Boozing it up in the Hermit Kingdom

At a time when our nation’s security apparatus is no doubt refreshing contingency plans for a war with North Korea, it’s worth noting that the North Koreans themselves doggedly persevere despite oppression from within and a militarized US foreign policy from without. For a counter-narrative to the predictable Sturm und Drang between Washington and Pyongyang, see below:

The bedlam revealed here is not a regular occurrence in ancient Sonchon, a North Korean coastal city about thirty-five miles south of the border with China. Sightings of foreigners are about as infrequent as they are anywhere else in the self-styled “Hermit Kingdom,” so it’s not surprising that a long-awaited visit from a delegation of aid workers would be celebrated with a decidedly unproletarian extravagance.

The lanky gent above toasting his bibulous hosts is Dr. Stephen Linton, who has just completed his resupply of medical goods at Sonchon People’s Hospital. The seated apparatchik with the toothy grin and heroically pomaded hair is the hospital director, and the young lady greeting Linton’s glass with one of her own is the proprietress of People’s No. 6 Diner, which apparently doubles as Sonchon’s top restaurant and unofficial greeting hall for visiting dignitaries.

I was along for the ride while reporting a profile of Linton and his work with North Korea’s tuberculosis victims. Journalists are regarded warily in the country, and I had been given the ground rules well before my arrival for the twelve-day assignment: no photographs between destinations, don’t talk politics with the minders, stick with the group at all times, don’t go near TB patients unless you’re wearing a mask, and eat and drink whatever the North Koreans put in front of you.

Hold it. Eat and drink? We were talking, or so I thought, about a famine-stricken country where people are commonly reduced to eating boiled tree bark. Could the local economy muster a selection of foodstuffs beyond the inevitable offerings of kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage that is a staple in rich South Korea and a guilty pleasure in its impoverished neighbor?

As it turned out, the delegation did not want for good eating. On the contrary, we were welcomed and provided for as honored guests while we journeyed from one rural sanatorium to the next in a convoy of SUVs. At every stop, after dispensing drugs, electrocardiographs, parkas, and stethoscopes, we were ushered into the office of the director and treated to platters of roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, apples, and roast chicken. On tap were bottles of beer and soju, a high-octane hooch brewed from fermented potatoes or grains. (It’s best administered as a general anesthetic, of which the country is in dreadfully short supply.) The head of a care center in Ryongsong, a northern district of Pyongyang, celebrated our arrival by passing around shot glasses of ginseng-flavored soju that had the flavor and viscosity of cough syrup. We washed the shots down with beer chasers. It was nine in the morning.

Occasionally Linton and his delegation would be fêted beyond the confines of the care center. But the saturnalia at Sonchon was unforgettable. The business of resupply done, we were escorted to the diner, where a narrow table was set for 16 guests. Within minutes, we were steeped in small dishes filled with culinary confections hauled mostly from the nearby Yellow Sea. There were fried clams in their shells, crabmeat, cold cuttlefish diced and marinated in spicy garlic sauce, whole baby squid, fried dumplings, pâté of donkey meat, green-bean pancakes with congealed pig-fat centers (good for digestion, I was told), and rabbit fricassee prepared at table on portable gas stoves.

The toastmasters came at us in human waves. The soju and the steam from the fricassee provided an illusion of ambient warmth in defiance of North Korea’s severe energy shortages, though no one removed their coats. The diner’s windows fogged up, and the feast went on for more than two hours. Reluctantly, Linton declared our need to move on, which unleashed a scramble for photographs with the exclusively female and impressively apple-cheeked staff. Heady from the attention and nearly blind from the booze, I briefly convinced myself that I had liberated North Korea.

A snap snowstorm arrived, and with it its sobering properties. We climbed into the vehicles and continued on our way.

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The Muslim Brotherhoood in Transition

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based Islamist group that consumes the minds of American neoconservatives but rates hardly a second thought in Egypt, is in many ways like an ancient papyrus roll displayed in an airtight case lest it crumble when exposed to the elements.

The oxygen and light now leavening Egyptian politics is apparently doing just that. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that the Muslim Brotherhood’s youth branch was appealing to group elders for “an affiliated political party based on the values of the Muslim Brotherhood but not strictly religious.” Forming such a group, one youth leader told the FT, “would prove that we are peaceful, want to work in an institutional framework and are seeking to reform society in all its aspects.”

The fragmentation of Egypt’s largest and most influential Islamist movement should surprise no one who has spent time listening to its members. Far from being a monolith, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, as it is known in Arabic, is well scored by demographic and ideological fault lines. Its diversified ranks—young and old, blue-collar and bourgeoisie, worldly and parochial—shared above all else a hatred of the despot who tormented it. Assuming Egypt will reap the bounty of its democratic revolution—and there are indications that the military authority that now controls the nation may obstruct such a harvest—the elimination of Hosni Mubarak could mean the end of the Ikhwan as we know it.

Well before Mohammed Akef, who in spring 2009 became the first of the Ikhwan’s Supreme Guides to step down from office rather than seek another term, the group was showing signs of strain. (Unlike most political institutions in the Arab world, the Brotherhood holds regular ballots, and 80 percent of its leadership body is directly elected.) Pragmatists like Akef had urged Ikhwan members to participate in provincial and national campaigns, and in a 2005 contest they emerged with an impressive 20 percent share of seats in Parliament. In response, Mubarak cracked down bloodily on the group, vindicating the Ikhwan’s conservative Salafi movement, which was appealing for a withdrawal to the mosque.

The election in January 2010 of Akef’s successor, a relative unknown conservative named Mohammed Badie, was regarded as a victory for Akef’s detractors and a setback for the Brotherhood’s youth wing, which the outgoing Supreme Guide had promoted. A year before Badie’s election, a young Ikhwan member named Mohammed Adel told me that his co-generationalists were seizing the initiative, collaborating with secular opposition groups in defiance of the old guard. “You have a lot of young people who want to be in the leadership, but none of them are in the senior ranks,” he said. “We want to take things to the street.”

So they did. It was the participation of the Brotherhood’s young cadres that lent critical mass to the demonstrations that toppled Mubarak. Conspicuously absent in the confrontation was the Ikhwan’s conservative wing, now a static player in a profoundly ecumenical movement radiating across the Arab world.

Ahmed Salah is a young dissident and secularist who has spent years in Egypt’s political opposition. (In the revolution’s formative hours in Tahrir Square, he was arrested by security agents, beaten and released back into the crowd, only to take a rubber bullet it the head three days later.) On Thursday, he told me by phone that the Muslim Brotherhood had been a marginal player in the upheaval except for its young leaders, who were exploiting a leadership vacuum for the sake of aggrandizing power. The real menace to the revolution, he said, was the military council that has installed itself as a provisional government. Rather than convening talks with a wide array of opposition leaders, Salah told me, it is soft-stalling secularists’ demand for constitutional reform while “negotiating” with an inchoate opposition that includes members of the Ikhwan’s youth branch. (The Financial Times seemed to corroborate Salah’s account, reporting in its Wednesday edition that some thirty human rights groups have criticized the military for excluding secular groups from the constitutional reform panel, which they said was dominated “either by Islamists or legal experts who had helped draw up laws that restricted democracy under Hosni Mubarak.”)

The implication is that Brotherhood upstarts will barter away the soul of the revolution in return for a slice of power in the new regime, in which the generals preserve de facto, if not de jure, control of the country. Such a deal would be similar to the one their fathers kept with Mubarak—accommodation for the sake of autonomy, suggesting what may be a cross-generational fear of having to compete with secularists in a free marketplace of ideas.

“This is a crucial and worrisome time for the movement,” Salah said.

Ambition, guile and low cunning are intrinsic to all political insurgencies. If the peaceful revolt that saw off one dictatorship in Egypt is to be subverted by a new one, the Muslim Brotherhood, with a new generation at the helm, will adapt and survive. If, however, the Egyptian people prevail and the generals are turfed out to the barracks, that same cadre of young Ikhwan leaders will joust for power as one political constituency among many. Either way, Egypt’s most powerful Islamist group has vacated its display case.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/158716/muslim-brotherhood-transition

Let their joy be our joy

Thus the prophet Mohammed, having encountered Jews fasting to commemorate the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, marked what would be the Day of Ashura on the Muslim calendar. The liberation of modern Egypt from thirty years of despotism is its own Exodus, the power and significance of which will not be fully appreciated for a generation. Nor is it at all clear where the journey will take a people who have known nothing but the whip hand of pharaohs, caliphs, kings, imperial occupiers and, most recently, a secular tyrant. One thing is obvious, however, though it has been drowned out by the euphoric din that radiates from Tharir Square across the Arab world: the manner, as much as the fact, of Hosni Mubarak’s departure will hasten the long recessional of American influence and authority, particularly in the Middle East. The by-now irredeemable gap between the reality of the region and the one concocted in Washington leaves little room for imagination and daring, as revealed by the cautious and equivocating way in which President Obama handled his end of the crisis. By conflating the Muslim Brotherhood with Al Qaeda, for example, America has all but relieved itself of any credibility it may have once enjoyed among the Arabs. Brandishing the Zionist cudgel, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, this week urged “the unequivocal rejection of any involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists” in the transfer of power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Fortunately, the capacity of Ros-Lehtinen to shape Middle Eastern affairs is as limited as her comprehension of them. But she and functionaries like her can frustrate US attempts to engage the Middle East on its own terms, a radical approach suited to revolutionary times. Appealing for a transition gradual enough to allow secular political groups to compete with the more muscular Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared as parochial political elites throwing rocks at a passing train.

The failure of Washington to anticipate Egypt’s upheaval is symptomatic of its gradual estrangement from the world it presumes to lead. So as not to antagonize Mubarak, the State Department after 9/11 segregated its diplomats from opposition groups, in particular the well-connected Brotherhood, effectively neutralizing its eyes and ears. The Pentagon, which enjoys strong ties to its Egyptian counterpart through officer-exchange programs that date back three decades, apparently produced little in the way of useful information about a looming succession crisis. Nor, for that matter, did the CIA.

Here was an intelligence shortage of epic proportions. For years, Egypt’s opposition leaders, intellectuals, and journalists had been warning anyone who would listen about the mortal absurdity of Mubarak’s vow to die in office even as he was grooming his son to succeed him, a prospect emphatically rejected by both the military and civil society. What did reach Washington, according to the trove of US diplomatic cables released in January by Wikileaks, was the message that the military would willingly guarantee a dynastic transfer of power. A July 2009 cable, based on an interview with an Egyptian politician, assures Foggy Bottom that a smooth transition is likely. “There would be some violence around the upcoming 2010 parliamentary and 2011 presidential elections,”according to the cable, “but…security forces would be able to keep it under control.”

The cable continues: “Widespread politically-motivated unrest was not likely because it was not part of the ’Egyptian mentality’. Threats to daily survival, not politics, were the only thing to bring Egyptians to the streets en masse.”

By ruling out relations with legitimate political movements abroad in reaction to political pressure at home, America denies itself the reference points needed to navigate competently through an unpredictable and often hazardous world. Rather than light a candle to illuminate the path before it, Washington curses the darkness of inconvenient facts. So when the dawn rose over Egypt to reveal a new age, America was nowhere to be found.

Backward, Christian Soldiers

The Nation 2011-02-28 Late last summer, Mikey Weinstein broke up a fight between Crystal and Ginger, the guard dogs trained to protect him and his family from a violent reckoning with Christian zealots. For the 55-year-old civil rights activist committed to ridding the US military of religious intolerance, it was a refreshingly secular and evenly matched bout. Weinstein is, after all, famously combative, both pugnacious and profane, with the bearing and sensibility of a mastiff. In the end he prevailed and peace was restored, though at the price of some bad scratches on his arms and a hole in his right hand where a well-aimed canine had struck.

Only wags and heretics would suggest that such a stigmata-like wound places Weinstein in the company of another Jewish prophet who spoke truth to the legions of an imperial power. At the very least, however, his journey from corporate lawyer to patriarch of a tribe of persecuted minorities is worthy of an Old Testament morality play. For the past half-decade, the Air Force Academy alum has labored to reverse the currents of Pentecostalism that course through the US military in general and the Air Force in particular.

It is an asymmetrical struggle, an endless round of Whac-a-Mole with a network of fundamentalist groups that would otherwise level the wall separating church and state with the help of supine, if not complicit, Pentagon top brass. In the battle over the meaning and implications of the First Amendment, Weinstein has staked himself at the fault line between the free-exercise clause and the establishment clause, which simultaneously preclude Congress from legislating a state religion and guarantee freedom of worship.

“The free-exercise clause does not trump the establishment clause,” Weinstein says from the living room of his home, a tastefully designed adobe ranch house in Albuquerque. “Our Bill of Rights was specifically created not for the convenience of the majority but to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. From that perspective it is absolutely imperative.”

Since he established his watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in 2005, Weinstein has built a client base of more than 20,000 mostly Catholic and Protestant—as well as Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, atheist, and gay and lesbian—members of the military. For them, Weinstein and MRFF are the only recourse for servicemen and -women who have been either punished for their faith or subjected to fundamentalist proselytizing in violation of military guidelines.

Consider, for example, the ferocity with which Weinstein and his undermanned crew of mostly volunteer staff reacted to the Air Force Academy’s recent invitation to Marine Lt. Clebe McClary, a controversial evangelical Christian, to speak at a prayer luncheon. In a January 22 letter to the academy, MRFF argued that McClary’s “intense, unreasoned and psychotic demonstration of unilateral and distorted Christian doctrine” would define the luncheon as “a revival meeting with the purpose of proselytizing and achieving Christian supremacy.” Weinstein then worked the media, landing notices about MRFF’s complaints in the Washington Post, The Raw Story and DailyKos. He urged groups such as the ACLU and Veterans for Common Sense to pile on and, on January 31, after the academy refused to budge, he filed a formal complaint in federal court demanding that the academy cancel its luncheon “on the grounds that it is a blatant violation of the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights as guaranteed by the First Amendment.” (As The Nation went to press, a federal district court was set to hear MRFF’s request.)

A similar MRFF onslaught in October compelled its superintendent to release the classified results of a survey that revealed only partial success in its efforts to enhance religious tolerance. It was an important, albeit tactical, concession in what the Pentagon clearly regards as a war of attrition. One of Weinstein’s most recent cases concerns a Christian group at the Colorado Springs–based Air Force Academy that allegedly promotes fealty to God over temporal authority, disempowers women and encourages its members to intermarry. The academy leadership, Weinstein insists, has all but ignored the group and has stonewalled his demands for an investigation.

“They let Mikey throw blows, and they hope one day he’ll get tired and go away, but someone’s gotta be out there,” says Joe Wilson, the former US ambassador and an MRFF board director who famously confronted the national security establishment himself during the Iraq War. “There’s a need to take it to them, knock them back on their heels. Otherwise you lose.”

Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman said the Defense Department “places a high value on the rights of military members to observe the tenets of their respective religions and does not endorse any one religion or religious organization.” Under its equal opportunity policy, the spokesman said, of 1.4 million active-duty members of the US military, only fifteen filed formal complaints related to religious harassment and proselytizing in 2009.

The Christianizing of the armed forces, Weinstein believes, has implications for national security as well as for civil rights. In addition to ingrained anti-Semitism, his work reveals a simmering Islamophobia in the ranks that, when flushed to the surface by media exposure, has been leveraged by jihadi groups overseas for propaganda purposes.

* * *

Leading the Pentecostalist charge is a constellation of different groups, none more prominent than Military Ministry, an affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ, a global outreach network with an estimated annual budget of nearly $500 billion, raised largely from individual donors and congregations, according to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Military Ministry maintains branch offices at the nation’s main Army bases, as well as overseas initiatives like Bible-study programs globally. The group’s mission statement, according to its website, is “To Win, Build, and Send in the power of the Holy Spirit and to establish movements of spiritual multiplication in the worldwide military community.” In a 2005 newsletter, Military Ministry’s executive director, retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, said the group “must pursue our…means for transforming the nation—through the military. And the military may be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure.”

Military Ministry is particularly well represented at basic training installations like Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army’s largest boot camp. According to MRFF researcher Chris Rodda, the group instructs recruits through Bible-study programs that “when you join the military, you’ve joined the ministry,” and it ardently associates conquest on the battlefield with religious conversion. In a 2007 report, MRFF provides links to photos of Fort Jackson troops posing with rifles in one hand and Bibles—some with camouflage covers—in the other. A Bible-study outline distributed by Military Ministry cites Scripture to sanction killing in combat by “God’s servant, an angel of wrath,” to “punish those who do evil.”

Other groups affiliated with Military Ministry include Valor, which targets future officers on ROTC campuses and labors to “help them become disciple makers around the world at their future duty assignments.” There is also Military Gateways, which concentrates on training agencies like the Defense Language Institute, and through its own array of subdivisions like Sailors for Christ, institutions like the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command and Naval Service Training Command.

Another prominent group, The Navigators, commands “thousands of courageous men and women passionately following Christ, representing Him in advancing the Gospel through relationships where they live, work, train for war, and deploy.” It has a permanent staff presence at military academies and its directors, like their counterparts at Military Ministry, frequently refer publicly to US servicemen and -women as “Government-Paid Missionaries for Christ.” (Pastor Ted Haggard, whose New Life Church was located a few miles from the Air Force Academy, was a familiar figure on campus until 2006, when it was revealed that he had had relations with a male escort and used illegal drugs.) The Navigators was founded in 1933 by Dawson Trotman, a mentor of Doug Coe, himself a prominent if low-key spiritual counselor to political elites in Washington. Coe is closely associated with C Street, an evangelical enclave for politicians and power brokers.

The revivalist subculture within the armed forces is as overt as Washington is loath to confront it. In late September Weinstein sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on behalf of more than 100 Air Force Academy cadets who said they were obliged to falsely assume fundamentalist identities—leaving Bibles and Christian literature and music CDs on their bunks, for example—lest they be singled out for harassment by their commanding officers. Weinstein’s letter, like his previous appeals to the defense secretary, was ignored. Congress is equally reluctant to take on the issue, and even Democratic lawmakers have distanced themselves from MRFF. Board director Wilson said he tried to persuade senior aides to Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to open hearings on some of the outrages Weinstein has unearthed, but to no avail. “What Mikey needs is a political ally, someone to champion his fight on the Hill,” said Wilson from his office in Santa Fe. “But the Christian right is very powerful, and no one wants to wage that war." (A source from the Senate Armed Services Committee says there is no recollection among committee members of such a discussion with Wilson, adding that the committee serves in an oversight role when it comes to reports of discrimination and proselytizing in the military. “The way we work is, we ensure the Department of Defense is investigating these allegations as they come up,” the source says.)

Weinstein was born and raised in Albuquerque, the son of a Naval Academy graduate who ultimately became a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 1977, he became a judge advocate general and, after leaving the military in 1989, worked as a Washington-based corporate lawyer and counselor to the Reagan White House. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he and his wife, Bonnie, lived a comfortably affluent life in the northern Virginia suburbs, attending their two sons’ sporting events in the afternoons and mingling with other A-listers on the Washington social circuit at night.

That changed abruptly in summer 2004, when Weinstein visited his son Curtis on the eve of his second year at the academy. Over lunch, a clearly agitated Curtis described several occasions when cadets and officers had subjected him to anti-Jewish verbal abuse. His account chilled Weinstein, who as a cadet had twice been beaten unconscious in anti-Semitic attacks. Weinstein filed a complaint; the Air Force responded by launching an investigation that exposed a predatory, top-down evangelicalism at the academy.

Since then, the Weinsteins have burned through their savings and retirement funds and leveraged credit card debt to sustain MRFF as a lonely sanctuary for besieged secularists. (MRFF often provides spending money for clients who are no longer in the military and are struggling to get by.) Each day, the group is peppered with appeals for help. During an interview with The Nation, Weinstein paused to take a dozen calls and text messages from clients in places from Fort Hood in Texas to Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where automatic rifle fire could be heard in the background.

The MRFF e-mail log is packed with detailed accounts of senior officers subverting with impunity regulations against evangelizing. In one, an Army staff sergeant tells how he and his comrades were forced to endure a Baptist minister’s graphic sermon about a girl who was roasted alive in a car crash along with her soul because she had not been baptized, then encouraged to embrace Christ with the help of religious counselors waiting just outside the door. In another case, during an official briefing an officer at a missile air base was treated to a Christian prayer for divine “guidance and direction” when deciding when to launch the weapons under his responsibility.

A First Amendment vigilante, Weinstein is also on intimate terms with its abusers. His hate mail—mostly anonymous and unprintable grace notes from the bosom of white Christian America—casts him as everything from a troublemaking Jew to the Antichrist. (Among Weinstein’s many critics is his daughter-in-law’s father, who in a June 24 letter in the Colorado Springs Gazette derided him as a Christian-hating publicity hound. In response, Amanda Lee Weinstein, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2004, wrote a lengthy defense of her father-in-law in Veterans Today, as “the one that I call Dad.”)

Death threats against Weinstein and his family are routine. Vandals have shot through the windows of the Weinstein family home and painted swastikas and crucifixes on its walls, smeared his door with feces and destroyed his mezuza, the parchment roll of Hebrew verse traditionally hung on the door frame of Jewish homes. He retains a detail of security and explosives experts, and he has positioned firearms—from a twelve-gauge shotgun to semiautomatic handguns—throughout the house. (Amber, Weinstein’s 23-year-old daughter, sleeps with a .357 revolver by her bed.) The guard dogs have been trained to fend off intruders for at least eight seconds, which security consultants estimate is the minimum amount of time the Weinsteins would need to get to their guns.

Firearms, however, are not Weinstein’s offensive weapon of choice. Armed with a hundred years of case law, he is most formidable in court. In 2004 MRFF was alerted by service members that chaplains embedded in combat units were handing out vernacular-language Bibles in Iraq and Afghanistan in violation of a Pentagon General Order that prohibits proselytizing of any kind. After MRFF took up the case, the Pentagon responded by confiscating and destroying isolated caches of Bibles, although according to MRFF such evangelizing continues in both countries.

In January 2010 Weinstein exposed a private contractor who was supplying rifle scopes to the Defense Department imprinted with coded references to Christ-related biblical verses. After ABC News did a report on the “Jesus rifles,” as Weinstein called them, the Defense Department ordered that the scopes be sanitized of any subliminal content.

In April, in response to MRFF demands, the Pentagon withdrew an invitation to the Rev. Franklin Graham, known for his Islamophobic remarks, to speak at a National Day of Prayer Task Force service. In August Weinstein revealed that troops from Virginia’s Fort Eustis were confined to their barracks and assigned cleanup duty after they refused to obey their commanders’ orders to attend the performance of a Christian rock group. That same month MRFF publicized the mass baptism of twenty-nine marines at California’s Camp Pendleton before their deployment to Afghanistan. News accounts of the ceremony, part of a battalion commander–inspired operation called “Sword of the Spirit,” were republished by Ansar Al-Mujahideen, a leading jihadi website.

* * *

The number of Muslim service members seeking Weinstein’s help has grown geometrically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the cruel odyssey of Zachari Klawonn is a particularly ripe narrative for the jihadi mill. The Fort Hood–based Army specialist, a model soldier with no reprimands on his record and some of the highest physical-fitness ratings in his unit, has alleged that he was subjected to regular abuse because of his Muslim faith. According to the half-Moroccan Klawonn, who enlisted two years ago at 18, his dream of being an Army careerist was challenged by a culture of Islamophobia from the day he put on his uniform. “With 9/11, Islamophobia in the military was born,” Klawonn said in an interview. “You can see it in the libraries, the Christian concerts. They look at me like I’m an outlaw.”

While marching in basic training, says Klawonn, troops would mockingly chant “hajji,” a term of respect in the Muslim world for those who make the annual hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. During a prisoner interrogation training exercise Klawonn was instructed by his drill sergeant to play the role of a suspected terrorist—not just for his own unit but for others throughout the day, depriving him of his own training interval. His requests to fast and pray were angrily denied, and his Koran was anonymously seized from his locker and torn to pieces.

The harassment continued at Fort Hood, where he was assigned in November 2008, and intensified a year later after Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting spree at a base medical clinic, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty. After a threatening note appeared on his barracks door, Klawonn was advised by Fort Hood authorities to find quarters outside the base because his safety could not be guaranteed, but he was denied the standard stipend for off-post housing.

On April 27 Klawonn turned to Weinstein, who immediately retained a Dallas-based attorney to represent his new
client. Within days, Klawonn was ordered to appear before the second-highest commander at Fort Hood, who demanded to know why he was generating such negative publicity. “Clearly they were feeling the heat,” he says.

With MRFF gathering evidence and interviewing prospective witnesses in anticipation of a lawsuit, things have improved for Klawonn. He has started receiving his housing allowance, and a Muslim prayer room and imam have been made available on base. As the details of his treatment have slowly emerged in the media, the hostility toward him has subsided. Many of the 3,540 active-duty Muslims serving in the military—the actual figure is probably higher, as a considerable number of them are thought to be “closeted”—have expressed their support for Klawonn’s cause. His ambition to make officer grade has survived his ordeal, and he is even considering a career in politics. “We’re going to fix what’s going on at Fort Hood,” he says. “The only thing to do is to be productive and progressive and tackle the problem head on. You lead by example.”

Asked if harassment and discrimination against Muslim soldiers like the kind Klawonn received could have contributed to Hasan’s murderous rampage, Klawonn acknowledges the possibility that it was provoked. Nothing justifies murder, he says, but “the reality is that there was Islamophobia at Fort Hood. Could it have pushed an individual to a breaking point? Absolutely.”

Should Klawonn’s case come to trial, a key witness on his behalf will likely be another victim of religious discrimination at Fort Hood. Zachary Arenz, an Army specialist who turned to MRFF in June, was subjected to sustained abuse not because he is a Muslim but because he is a Jew.

From 2007, when he first reported for duty at Fort Hood, to his departure from the service in June, Arenz was singled out by both flag and noncommissioned officers for his faith. His request for kosher meals in the field was denied, and he was ordered by his platoon sergeant to find a fatigue-colored yarmulke so as “to restrict its visibility.” In his cot after a day of field-training exercises, Arenz was reading Hebrew Scripture; his platoon sergeant loudly demanded to know why the Jews killed Jesus. On another occasion, Arenz returned to his barracks to find a swastika scrawled on the parchment from his mezuzah. At one point, his battalion commander told him that “all Jews make bad soldiers” and that Judaism was “incompatible with military service.” He was even ordered to give his mother’s telephone number to Fort Hood authorities so they could confirm that he was, in fact, Jewish. Eventually Arenz was found guilty in a court-martial of what he says were trumped-up charges of having a cellphone in the field and not being at an appointed place of duty.

During his struggle with the Army bureaucracy, Arenz, a native of Huntsville, Alabama, petitioned his senators and Congressman for assistance, with no success. “I just want my day in court,” he says. “I want to face my tormentors and I want them relieved.”

* * *

In addition to his running skirmishes with religious discrimination, Weinstein can now add alleged predation to his casebook. In October he agreed to represent Jean Baas, who charged that directors of a nonprofit organization called Cadets for Christ prey on Air Force Academy cadets and manipulate them into marrying one another, a common cult practice known as “shepherding.” Baas based her accusations on her experience with her daughter, Lauren, who, she claims, was brainwashed into participating in CFC’s rituals, culminating in her September engagement to a fellow group member.

“They still dictate every move she makes,” Baas said by telephone from her Gulfport, Mississippi, home, where Lauren grew up. “It’s sickening to watch while the Air Force does nothing.”

According to her mother, Lauren was a strong-willed and devout Catholic who attended Mass regularly at Colorado Springs during her first year at the Air Force Academy. In August 2008 she was recruited by a friend and CFC member to participate in the group’s functions, which included weekend spiritual retreats, Wednesday night Bible study on the academy grounds and dinners at the home of group directors Donald and Anna Warrick. Soon, according to Baas, Lauren was disparaging her family members as irredeemable papists. During visits home for holidays and semester breaks, she was sullen and aloof, retreating deep into the fold of Scripture. By March 2009 she had forsaken her dream of becoming an Air Force pilot for the divinely inspired role of wife and mother. That Labor Day weekend, Lauren e-mailed her parents of her intention to marry a fellow CFC member, whom she knew only through Bible study meetings. (Lauren had already formally announced her engagement during a CFC gathering at the Warricks’ home.) In late June Lauren and her fiancé spent several days with her parents in Gulfport, poring over packages of materials provided by the Warricks that enumerated the spousal responsibilities of the “shepherd” and his “sheep.”

Reached by e-mail, Donald Warrick described Cadets for Christ as “a Bible-study group for interested cadets,” many of whom have received early promotions to flag rank. About a third of its members worship with the Warricks, he wrote, while the rest attend services elsewhere, and “all of them are free to come and go from our study as they choose.” The CFC board is aware of the allegations made by Jean Bass and Weinstein’s representation of her, according to Warrick, “and while their reality about what takes place and is taught in Cadets for Christ is far different from our own they are of course free to say what they want, and we wish them well.”

The Baases and their daughter, now stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, are completely estranged. “I’m not surprised this kind of evangelicalism exists,” says Baas. “But I am surprised at where it takes place. This is no accident. Someone is allowing these people to operate there.”

A current MRFF client corroborates Baas’s account of Cadets for Christ and indications of at least passive academy support for the group. In an e-mail made available to The Nation on the understanding that its author will remain anonymous, the client says her daughter was recruited by the Warricks, whom she describes as “dangerous and destructive individuals.” Just as disturbing, she writes, “is how these folks are at the academy, recruiting some of the brightest and the best, to carry out their mission…right under the unsuspecting or maybe the knowing, leaders of the academy. Then when it is pointed out to them, it is denied. Is that denial out of ignorance or is it to protect? This is why I say that this issue may be much bigger and broader than what appears.”

Asked for comment, Air Force Academy spokesman
Lt. Col. John Bryan said the allegations relating to Cadets for Christ are not substantiated. Bryan also stated that “the academy remains committed to protecting an individual’s right to practice any religion they choose, or no religion, provided their practices do not violate policy or law or impede mission accomplishment.”

When Baas petitioned the academy for help, she was told by a chaplain to write a letter to the superintendent but to betray “no feelings, so as not to sound like a crying mother.” In the fall, she came across MRFF during an Internet search and, frustrated with what she regarded as academy inertia, contacted Weinstein. With signature alacrity, he fired off e-mails to senior Air Force officers in Washington—including a former Air Force chief of staff—and the media, landing an exposé in Truthout, the online general news site. He publicly expressed outrage that academy officials would allow a private religious group to proselytize at a government institution, a charge he said was corroborated by statements from dozens of cadets. “We are now in a state of war with the academy,” he told the weekly Colorado Springs Independent in September.

He was back in the ring, canines bared.

Egypt for the Egyptians

The ebullience of a near-emancipated Egypt stands in revealing contrast to the hand-wringing in Washington over its implications. Only now, as it becomes not only possible but highly probable that President Hosni Mubarak may soon be exiled to his own Elba, are America’s diplomatic and security apparatchiks allowing for a Middle East without their most dependable Arab autocrat. How, they wonder aloud, will the US impose its authority on the region if its fighter and refueling jets are barred from Egyptian airspace and its warships are prohibited from entering the Suez Canal? What chances are there for Middle East peace should a new regime open its border with Gaza? What if the Muslim Brotherhood turns the Arab world’s most vital nation into an Islamic republic? “This is a big deal with huge potential consequences for U.S. strategic interests in a vital region,” Martin S. Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, breathlessly told The New York Times. “We’re in completely uncharted territory.” True enough for the Yanks, though for previous imperial powers this is all well-worn terrain. In the early 1950s, the British and French were caught flat-footed by a barracks coup against their own Egyptian proxy, the voraciously corrupt, incompetent and rotund King Farouk. When Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the so-called “Free Officers” who brought down Farouk, emerged as president, among his first acts was to nationalize the Franco-British controlled Suez Canal. In response, London and Paris, with Israeli help, maneuvered to undermine Nassar and restore their authority by invading the canal zone. The 1956 Suez Crisis ended in ignominy for the conspirators when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower all but ordered them to withdraw, while Nasser’s credibility soared throughout the non-aligned world.

Just as London and Paris cursed Egyptian resistance to their hegemony – British Prime Minister Anthony Eden likened Nasser to Hitler, while British radio called him a “barking dictator” – American policymakers now dread the prospect of challenges to their own. Unlike Eden, however, who did little to hide his contempt for Third World upstarts, US leaders are now caught in the rip-tides of their own hypocrisy. Nowhere has America’s public embrace of human rights and self-determinism clashed as discordantly as they have in its quiet support for Hosni Mubarak, who famously cowed US officials into line with ominous talk of an Islamist revolution should he yield to any form of dissent. In late 2005, when Mubarak finally relented to President George W. Bush’s pressure for national elections, which despite gross occasions of fraud and voter intimidation resulted in a resounding triumph for the Muslim Brotherhood, Bush backed away from his “freedom agenda.” Since then, Mubarak’s despotism has only intensified.

For anyone who has followed Egypt’s political paroxysms over the last decade, the current reckoning comes as no surprise. While reporting in Egypt two years ago, opposition leaders assured me they would not tolerate another term of dictatorship. Analyst Osama Harb was most prescient. In the end, he said, Mubarak would be undone by his own legacy of corruption, malfeasance and the “miserable condition” of average Egyptians. There would be “general chaos,” he said, and “tanks in the streets.”

Predictably, such warnings were lost on the New Rome, where the imperial warrant is held in higher regard than the foreign unfortunates who stagger beneath it. Empire is the highest, and thus most pernicious, expression of militarization, and in Hosni Mubarak Washington enjoyed a most agreeable host. Like most of America’s post-Cold War partnerships, the relationship between the two parties had become an end in itself, a diplomatic compact Malthusian in its rate of diminishing returns. From a depleted US treasury, Cairo is showered with billions of dollars in subsidies to preserve its peace treaty with Israel, support of which is as much a strategic liability for America as it is for Egypt; it must concede its air and sea lanes to the Pentagon in Levantine wars of ruinous consequence; sustain an Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” that achieves a mirage of deliberation but nothing of substance; and suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, the only Egyptian political party whose leaders regularly submit their authority to scheduled, transparent and democratic referendums.

If ever there was an unholy alliance in need of exorcism, this is it. Tonight, I hoist a glass given to me years ago by a waiter at Cairo Station’s main cafe (an art-deco jewel), in tribute to the legions of Egyptians who bravely reject the post-Ottoman Middle East and the western powers that usurped it.

Egypt for the Egyptians.

Will Gallant Obama Enter the Raptor's Lair and Slay It?

The National 2008-12-16 19:37:21US President George W. Bush has shown us how much easier it is to wage war, even an unnecessary one, than it is to control the US defence budget. From 2001 to this year, defence spending rose to US$480 billion (Dh1.76 trillion), an increase of 60 per cent. Include off-budget expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that figure swells to $670bn. The US spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined, with an annual outlay slightly larger than the GDP of Turkey, the world's 17th-largest economy. If there was ever a prime target for cost cutting in the world's most indebted economy - particularly in this recession - it is America's bloated defence budget. But will Barack Obama, the president-elect, pull the -trigger? If Mr Obama wants to demonstrate to the world his commitment to budgetary discipline in the face of fierce political pressure, he must do just that. He must venture into the lair of the Raptor and slay it. The F-22 Raptor war plane, produced by Lockheed Martin, is an engineering marvel. Among its many tricks is to pivot horizontally as it surveys the horizon for targets. It is also, as its name suggests, a dinosaur, designed to match the best Soviet fighters never built. Since it was developed in the late 1980s, the US government has spent $65bn manufacturing the F-22, which -- depending on how many are produced -- costs between $140 million and $345m, according to the US government accountability office. (The Pentagon's other "fifth generation" warplane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a bargain at $70m a unit.) The air force is lobbying for $9bn to build 60 more F-22s over three years, for a total fleet of 243. The air force says it needs the aircraft to counter the threat from... well, no one is sure, really. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, who has been asked by Mr Obama to remain at his post, opposes further investment in the programme. There is nothing in the Russian or Chinese air arsenals to match the F-22, assuming they would ever be inclined to try. So far, the only battle the Raptor has fought has been with budget hawks, and it has won them all. If the fighter has no peer for manoeuvrability in the skies, neither is there anyone in Washington to rival the marketing instincts of its maker. In developing the aircraft, Lockheed Martin was careful to spread its supplier network across many legislative districts, meaning 25,000 workers owe their livelihoods to the Raptor at a time when the US economy is expected to contract. Senior legislators, Republican and Democrat, support the F-22 for the sake of the jobs that would be lost to production cuts -- making it a $65bn jobs mill. If only this situation ended with the F-22. The US defence budget is packed with outdated weaponry that could have been discarded decades ago were it not for nest-feathering politicians. Donald Rumsfeld, Mr Gates's predecessor and a formidable Washington operator, tried with little success to transform the Pentagon's cold-war arsenal into a lighter, more flexible fighting force. He, too, tried to ground the Raptor, only to be outmanoeuvred by politicians. Now it is Mr Gates's turn. Fortunately, his new boss seems to be far more interested in the federal bureaucracy, including its military budget, than did Mr Bush. If the president-elect can't pull the nation's defence spenders into line, no one can. The question is whether Mr Obama will have the courage to choose fiscal temperance over political sanctuary.

EU Finally Puts On A Show That Is Worth Watching

The National2009-11-01 22:31:16 In case you missed it, the EU has done something completely out of character. It has become interesting.

Consider the countervailing developments that shook the EU last month. In a referendum, Ireland conclusively endorsed the Lisbon Treaty, an administrative reform plan that supporters say will make the common market more efficient. The Irish "aye" pressured David Cameron, the British parliamentarian who is due to become the prime minister next year once he undergoes the formality of an election, to declare whether he sides with extremists in his Conservative Party who oppose British membership of the EU.

Mr Cameron, who has implied he would dismantle at least some of Britain's EU commitments, has led the offensive against the former prime minister Tony Blair's bid to become the union's first president, an office provided for under the Lisbon Treaty. (The presidential seal, a yellow swoosh on a blue field, looks like something a superhero would wear on his cape. This begs the question: could "Euroman" be far behind?)

Economically, EU states are splitting ranks as countries such as Germany and France display signs of recovery while others, such as Spain and Ireland, are still sucking wind. At the same time, several of the EU's powerhouse members continue to pile on debt to stimulate growth. France, for example, has just announced a budget deficit for next year worth 8.5 per cent of GDP, while Germany has indicated it will begin to dismantle the €50 billion (Dh270.56bn) stimulus package it launched in January. The European Central Bank (ECB) has suggested that unless Europe's debt-engorged economies agree to shed their large public shortfalls, it will be obliged to raise interest rates to keep inflation within the 2 per cent limit ordained by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that established the euro.

Norway, rich in oil and a non-EU member, last week became the first European country to raise credit rates, a reminder that inflation may be less remote than many economists once averred and a warning that the 16 EU states that share the euro, a currency bloc that does not include the UK, may pay a price for failing to co-ordinate their fiscal policies in the global downturn.

That appeared to be the subtext of remarks made this month by Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the ECB, about the consequences of an "uneven" recovery in euroland.While assuring investors that the bank's base interest rate would remain at its record low level of 1 per cent for the time being, Mr Trichet also said eurozone inflation was likely to turn positive "in the coming months". Lest reporters doubt the resilience of his delightfully dry sense of humour, the ECB chief also restated his faith in Washington's official "strong dollar" policy - reaffirmed to general hilarity by the US Treasury last week - despite the dollar's 17 per cent decline against the euro this year.

Suddenly, the dull business of European integration has become a rollicking feast of tension, intrigue, and self-parody. Anyone concerned that the departure of Mr Blair, with his Bill Clinton-like craving for love and attention, would starve official Europe of the odd prurient thrill can breathe easy. (Raise your hand if you think Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, had lost his subtle, ironic touch.)

Now we have forceful Europeanists such as David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, who warned in the Financial Times this week that splitters such as Mr Cameron were "dangerous to Britain, dangerous for our influence, dangerous for our interests". And in case anyone is wondering, Mr Miliband, 44, "is not a candidate" and is "not available" for that EU president's seat.

Who would have thought that on the 10th anniversary of the birth of the euro that the EU in general and monetary union in particular would incite such passion? Did not the euro protect Europe from an Icelandic-style currency collapse? Has it not served as a popular safe haven for investors in these uncertain times? The terms of Maastricht may seem draconian to Eurosceptics as member countries are forced to relinquish control over monetary policy. But what is the alternative? A withering cycle of competitive devaluations of the kind that prevailed in the 1930s?

What, after all, was so special about those drachmas, pesetas, and liras? If the Germans can give up their precious deutsche mark, that potent symbol of Teutonic redemption, why can't the British dispense with their pound? If anything, the world should welcome the expansion and internationalisation of the euro, which despite its success remains very much a regional unit of exchange. At a time when the dollar's long-term prognosis is for continued weakness - official US sentiments aside - the need for a viable alternative to the world's fiat currency is not only preferable but necessary for global monetary stability.

Will Mr Cameron indulge the reactionary wing of his party and wrench Britain from the continent? Will the ECB pre-emptively lower the boom on the EU's Keynesian revival? Will Mr Miliband be voted off the island? Stay tuned for the next new episode of "Lost in Euroland".

AIPAC's Achilles Heel

Al-Sijill
2009-08-02 22:29:15A friend of mine, a retired public servant who has worked under four US presidents, told me recently he was afraid the White House was making a mistake by openly confronting Israel over the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, particularly this early in the process. "These guys in the White House may be too smart for their own good," he told me. "They think that just by snapping their fingers they can get [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu to stop settlement expansion. I'm afraid they're going to get rolled on this one and that will imperil the prospects for everything else they're trying to do." Such concern reflects a healthy respect for the power of the so-called "Jewish lobby" despite suggestions it has been outmaneuvered by the supple President Barack Obama. Certainly the successful bid early this year to deny Israel critic Chas Freeman a top White House intelligence job is proof that the "lobby" is very much at the top of its game. Hawkish supporters of Israel, of course, deny that a Jewish lobby even exists and imply those who believe otherwise are anti-Semitic. This is nonsense. In a city like Washington, where everything has some kind of political representation - there is even an "Association of Associations" on 17th Street - it would be unnatural if Israel did not have its own advocates in place. But the caricature of the Israel lobby so common among its critics - a singularly pernicious and monolithic group dedicated to the restoration of Eretz Yisrael, a "greater" Jewish state that extends from the Nile to the Euphrates - is equally inane. Like Israel itself - diverse ethnically and chaotic politically - the Jewish lobby is a conurbation of parties that, given the deep divergence of opinion about what's good for Israel, are often pitched against each other. Not only is this cluster of competing groups not a political monolith, it is not even monolithically Jewish. The wellspring of Congressional support for Israel is fed as much by fundamentalist Christian groups like Christians United for Israel - led by the execrable Pastor John Hagee - than it is right-wing Jewish groups like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Catalyzed by the promise of Christ's apocalyptic return to Earth after the land of Israel has been restored in its entirety to the Jewish people, groups like CUFI are a source of unyielding support for Israel's hard-liners and they form a tight alliance with the American-Israel Political Affairs Committee, the most well-known and powerful of Jewish pro-Israel groups. AIPAC is vast - it operates with an estimated budget of some $60 million and boasts some 100,000 dues-paying members - and it is indeed pernicious. Its staff writes key provisions of legislation and it was largely responsible for the US economic and diplomatic embargo on the Palestinians Territories after Hamas' 2006 election victory. Its annual conference in Washington is a multi-day affair attended by the country's most powerful politicians and businesspeople, who emote like trained seals about the centrality of America's "special relationship" with the Jewish state. The carnival-like atmosphere brings out the worst in everyone - the Prophet Isaiah and his dark prophesies is something of an AIPAC mascot - including those not ordinarily associated with the Likud end of the political spectrum. Even Mr. Obama, in the AIPAC speech he delivered while campaigning for president last year, obscured himself with puffs of fire and brimstone. AIPAC's dominance is not uncontested, however. There is J Street, founded last year as a moderate alternative to AIPAC militarism. Last month, the group's executive director was invited to attend a meeting of prominent Jewish leaders at the White House July 14, a measure of its growing influence in an issue arena still dominated by the hawks. (Another measure of J Street's credibility is its growing list of enemies. The right-wing magazine Commentary has called it "anti-Israel" and "contemptible.") There is also Americans for Peace Now, which has been lobbying Congress for a more measured approach towards Arab-Israeli peace for years. But like J Street, APN's passion and principles are no match for AIPAC's political muscle. AIPAC has an Achilles heel, however, and it plays out like something out of the 1967 Khartoum conference. By aligning itself so conclusively against the only steps that might lead to a more stable Middle East - No talks with Hamas, No land for peace, No negotiations with Iran over its nuclear ambitions - it has defined itself as an obstruction to peace that might alienate those who support Israel but who are weary of its obstinacy. As the turbulence in Iran suggests, militancy is no longer in fashion, which plays to the famously empathetic Obama's strength. It also leads us back to my friend's observation about the White House's approach to the scandal of Jewish settlements. By forcing such a delicate issue on an Israeli leader as vulnerable as Netanyahu, Obama might be attempting to spark a political crisis in Tel Aviv from which a more reasonable successor may emerge. But as the last eight years of Bushism revealed, regime change rarely goes according to plan and often backfires. To outflank the Likudniks, Obama should seek first to deliver an Arab heavyweight to the negotiating table with an assurance of White House support for the essence of the 2002 Arab initiative. If a Bashar Al Assad were to make a public tribute to Yitzhak Rabin and his "calculated risks" for peace, it would box Netanyahu into a corner so dark that no lobby, monolithic or otherwise, could ever find him. Full Article (in Arabic) (.pdf)

China Risks Living Down to Its Enemies' Stereotype

The National
2009-07-26 17:37:12There is China, and there is China. The China of the imagination – the looming aggressor and future rival to US hegemony – was quite busy last week. It figured heavily in a bid by politicians to save the F-22 fighter jet from the budget knife. (Wiser heads prevailed; the programme was cut.) It was the impetus behind an agreement, announced in New Delhi, in which Washington will transfer advanced weapons technology to India, and it lent a sense of urgency to appeals from Geek Nation for a revived manned space programme. This China, according to alarmists confined in Washington, not only has the means of developing a fifth-generation fighter jet by 2020, but also a reason for doing so. (After all, if Beijing really wanted to harm the US, it could simply unburden its massive foreign exchange reserves of dollars. But let’s not clutter the narrative with facts.) Should this fictional China ever choose to invade, say, the strategic hamlet of Barstow, California, close security ties with India could mean the difference between victory or defeat. Meanwhile, enthusiasts for a new round of moon shots (motto: “to financial irresponsibility and beyond!”) mutter ominously of Beijing’s yawning lead in a new space race. Of course, no one likes to refer to China directly as an existential threat. For one thing, it’s bad economics to antagonise your banker. For another, tarting up China as a superpower rival is something of a stretch, given how it has no ability to project force – no deep-water navy, no in-air refuelling capability, and so on – and it seems in no particular rush to develop any. Still, security planners looking for a threat to inflate have no better options, so China, or at least its doppelganger, will have to do. This is unfortunate, because it obscures how badly the real China has been behaving of late. Over the past month or so, Beijing has been weaving itself into a self-parody of Sinophobia. This month, it arrested the China-based country representative of Rio Tinto, the Australian mining giant, on hazy charges of espionage. As Chinese authorities have been tight-lipped about the nature of the accusations – the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was forced to ask the US commerce secretary to raise the issue with Beijing during his recent visit there – the affair has raised speculation that the arrest is simply payback for Rio Tinto’s clumsy abandonment last month of a planned merger with Chinalco, China’s state-owned metals company. Chinese mercantilism, never far below the surface, is reasserting itself. Beijing is the subject of a growing list of trade disputes, from Australia’s claim that Chinese aluminium smelters are dumping product at below market rates to US and EU complaints about alleged tariffs on imported raw materials. The flurry of allegations follows China’s recent announcement that it would strictly enforce its “buy Chinese” policy as a condition of its US$585 billion (Dh2.15 trillion) economic stimulus package, part of a worldwide outbreak of economic nationalism that began, disgracefully enough, in the US. Beijing is leveraging its enormous demand for renewable energy, not by opening its market to foreign competition and providing contractors with the best product at market prices, but by identifying it as a strategic industry to be insulated by tariff and non-tariff barriers. Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, and other senior trade officials have complained to Beijing that contracts for such projects as wind farms have been handed almost exclusively to Chinese firms, despite participation in tenders by western leaders in wind-turbine manufacturing. So lavishly is China subsidising its local clean-energy industries, it has inspired a new phrase – “green protectionist”. Even as Beijing coddles local business, it offends neighbours by tormenting its own citizens. The clampdown this month on China’s Muslim population in western Xinjiang province has outraged Turkey, a close trading partner and ethnic cousin of the country’s beleaguered Uighurs. While the US and EU have been predictably docile in the face of China’s repression, Turkey has forcefully condemned it. Ankara has even threatened to abrogate lucrative defence deals, a move that would certainly concentrate minds in a government that has been under a global arms embargo since it lethally put down pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. In the 20 years since that bloody reckoning, China has navigated its way through an often hostile global economy with great skill. Its people are allowed unprecedented levels of economic freedom and millions have been lifted out of poverty. Beijing has, at its own pace and on its own terms, liberalised and internationalised its economy and it is now reaping the dividends with an anticipated 8 per cent growth rate this year. Now, it is squandering its credibility as an emerging global leader by reducing itself into a caricature of the farcical China – the one that opportunists in Washington have such an interest in perpetuating.

America’s IOU to California: One Political Overhaul

The National
2009-07-05 23:40:04Is California too big to fail? With taxpayers on the hook for the bailout of spectacular failures such as the insurance giant AIG and car maker General Motors, why shouldn't Washington save the Golden State? Politicians from California's state capital in Sacramento have already been to Washington, hat in hand. In June, a delegation of them persuaded top federal officials, starting with Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, to consider a rescue plan should the state go belly up. Well, this California native would thank the feds to keep their dole to themselves. In a country that insists on co-mingling "values" with policy, it is time to restore accountability and restraint as the core of democratic capitalism. California, the late, great frontier of libertarian virtue, is an appropriate place for it.The stakes could not be higher. California's GDP, at US$1.7 trillion (Dh6.24tn), not only accounts for 12 per cent of the US national output, it ranks as the eighth-largest worldwide. Yet for all its vast resources - the state leads the nation, if not the world, in agriculture, defence contracting, computer software, media and tourism - California has accumulated a $24 billion deficit that its gridlocked legislature has failed to reconcile. Last week, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, announced the state would be forced to issue IOUs to cover outstanding debts that could swell to $4.8bn by August if politicians cannot reach a budget agreement by then. California, which has the worst credit rating of any state in the country and has already accumulated nearly $60bn worth of municipal bonds, refuses to cover revenue gaps by taking on more debt. Such restraint is encouraging, but it comes late in the process and means little without significant spending cuts. Martin Weiss, an analyst at Weiss Research - best known for having forecast the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers last year - said last month the prospect of a default was "unavoidable". This is not the first time Sacramento has found itself on the brink of insolvency, however. The economy was hit hard by the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the defence sector's post-Cold War contraction, only to revive itself. Any state that can coexist with frequent onslaughts of fires, mudslides, earthquakes and religious cults can survive its current financial reckoning, assuming politicians are willing to roll up their sleeves and reform one of the most dysfunctional political regimes in the free world. California, to paraphrase Rick Blaine in Casablanca, is just like the rest of America, only more so. It is gluttonous; in the past five years alone, its budget has expanded by nearly 50 per cent, to $145bn. Its politics are more partisan, owing to a district representation system that entrenches incumbents and dissuades them from working with ideological rivals. Republicans and Democrats, as a result, habitually vote in opposition to one another on tax and spending bills. To make matters worse, California requires a two-thirds majority to pass its annual budget, one of only three US states to do so. Another burden on Sacramento is its chaotic "ballot box budgeting" system, which allows voters to support single interest programmes, from stem cell research to health and education issues, without identifying how they will be funded. The most notorious of these measures - Proposition 17, which became law in 1978 - gutted the state's revenue base by slashing property taxes, a move some analysts blame for much of the state's chronic funding gaps. Unlike its bush fires and floods, California's legislative process is a man-made disaster that can be corrected given the proper incentive - namely, the fear that Washington will refuse to come to its rescue. To do otherwise would hasten the final chapter of a state that once embodied that antique American quality of rugged individualism. Beginning in the 19th century, California became an El Dorado of the human spirit, a destination for innovators unafraid to fail. It lured moguls, thinkers, scoundrels and adventurers from everywhere. Levi Strauss created a clothing empire out of the state's legendary gold rush of 1849. William Randolph Hearst, the publisher, migrated from New York to San Francisco, where for a generation he dangled the fortunes of politicians, industrialists and warlords over the bonfire of his ambition. Amadeo Giannini, an Italian immigrant, built what would become the Bank of America by accepting handshakes as security against loans he wrote for victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Like all visionaries, men such as Strauss, Hearst and Giannini wanted the government out of their affairs when business was good - and they accepted their fate when things went south. So where do young entrepreneurs go today if they are willing to work without a net? Certainly not the US, where it appears no act of commercial malpractice is so severe it cannot be preserved with a drip feed of public funds. Hong Kong? Zagreb? The overweening dole has left us with few markets where it is OK to fail

In Damascus, Restoring Beit Farhi and the City’s Jewish Past

Smithsonian.com 2009-06-11

Ghosts inhabit Damascus' Old City like players on a stage. You can see them peering through the ramparts of the citadel and tending to the faithful at the Omayyad Mosque. In the narrow passageways of the main souk, they clamor among the spice markets and connive between the caravansary and Byzantine colonnade.

You can see them. There is the Ottoman Governor As'ad Pasha al-Azem, receiving visitors and hearing petitions in the salamlik of his palace, a Mamlukian treasure. Across the way is a merchant from Andalusia offering textiles from Pisa for a set of Persian ceramics. At the Burmistan al Nur, or "house of patients," a group of surgeons are gathered under a kumquat tree for a lecture on the latest techniques of scapulimancy - a method of divination - from Toledo, Spain. And here among litter of citrus fruit, chatting among shop owners and munching on Arab pastry, is the cunning and charismatic Mu'awiya - the caliph himself - so secure in his authority he is attended by only a single bodyguard.

But the real power center in Old Damascus - indeed, in the whole empire - is a few hundred yards away, off Al-Amin Street in the old Jewish Quarter. That would be Beit Farhi, the grand palace of Raphael Farhi, the successful banker and chief financial adviser to the Ottoman sultanate. It was Raphael and his older brother, Haim, who collected the taxes that financed the granaries, foundries and academies of Greater Syria, and it was the subterranean vaults of his palace that held the gold that backed the imperial coin. Until his family's tragic dissolution in the mid-19th century, Raphael Farhi - known as "El Muallim," or the teacher - was not simply the leader of Syria's famously prominent and prosperous Jewish community; He was one of the most powerful men in the Ottoman world. Hakam Roukbti knows this better than anyone. As the architect who has assigned himself the epic task of restoring Beit Farhi to its former glory, he has been working with a full complement of ghosts - Raphael, his brothers and their extended families, the palace guests and servants - peering over his shoulder. "The Farhis controlled all the finances in Greater Syria," says Roukbti. "He was paying the pashas' salaries. He appointed governors. This house was the most important of all the houses in Damascus."

Roukbti, a Syrian who left for Spain in 1966 to study Islamic art, and his wife, Shirley Dijksma, have devoted themselves to the faithful renovation of the massive and labyrinthian Beit Farhi -- from the Hebrew language inscriptions carved in the reception hall to the orange trees in the courtyards. Their goal is to complete the work this summer and launch it as a luxury boutique hotel not long after that.

It is all part of a wider renaissance in one of the longest-inhabited cities in the world. While an economic boom is transforming greater Damascus into a modern metropolis with five-star hotels and shopping malls, the old city is keeping true to itself. Villas and caravansary are being carefully restored and converted into restaurants, cafés, inns, and art salons. Even the usually absent municipal government is getting into the act; the citadel has been completely renovated and strips of the souk's narrow streets have been appointed with gas lamps.

At the epicenter of this reawakening is Beit Farhi, all 25,000 square feet of it. The rooms are nearly finished, complete with spot lighting and central heating, and soon the reception hall will be sealed under a glass canopy that will protect guests from the city's pollution and insects. (It was one concession Roukbti made to modernity.) The cellar bar, which will stretch along the entire north side of the palace, is poised to become a favored watering hole of Damascus' well-fixed expatriates. It was dug out at a price, however; according to Dijksma, an interior designer who promotes local Syrian artists, the same laborer was bitten three times by scorpions.

But while Beit Farhi may soon be hosting international film stars and celebrity politicians in its pricey chambers, it is far more than a commercial enterprise. The Muslim Roukbti and the Christian, Dutch-born Dijksma are on a mission that is as much ecumenical as aesthetic. The Syrian Jewish population has a history, as lush and complex as Beit Farhi's marble-inlaid floors, that begins on one end of the Mediterranean and ends on the other. For centuries, it was a vital part of the mosaic of varied religions and ethnicities that made Damascus the world's first city of commerce and culture.

For decades, the Jewish quarter has been a mute stepchild to the perennially chaotic main souk. Emptied after the creation of Israel and the wars that followed, its apartments and stalls have been padlocked by families now living elsewhere. Today, the remains of Syria's Jewish community consist of about three dozen aged men and women in Damascus and even fewer in the northern city of Aleppo. Albert Cameo, a leader of Syria's residual Jews, recalls with delight the day Roukbti introduced himself as the man who was going to save Beit Farhi. "I assumed he was crazy," Cameo says above the din of workers sanding stone walls in preparation for painting. "But then I thought, ‘What does it matter if he can pull it off?' And now, look at this miracle." Cameo, who like many Sephardic Jews - including the Farhis - has roots in Moorish Spain, grew up in a house just a few blocks away. He remembers his parents telling him stories about the Farhis and the great palace and how its library was open to any Jew who wanted to read from its many volumes. Cameo's recollections and those of his contemporaries have helped Roukbti in his restoration.

There are also written accounts from 19th-century visitors like Lady Hester Stanhope, the famous traveler and Orientalist, who described the palace's five inner courtyards, opulent gilded walls and gold-studded coffee cups. John Wilson, a noted biblical scholar of his day, wrote of the palace as "a little like a village ... [with] sixty or seventy souls. The roof and walls of the rooms around the court are gorgeous to a high degree." Wilson wrote of the Farhi's grand hospitality and he detailed the palace libraries, both the public one and Raphael's private book collection, in admiring detail. For the purposes of restoration, however, these accounts lacked depth. Roukbti and Dijksma had only one visual source that depicted Beit Farhi at its apex: an 1873 rendering of the palace's main courtyard by the classicist painter Sir Frederick Leighton. Titled Gathering Citrons, it portrays a woman in lavish robes looking on as an attendant drops fruit plucked from an orange tree into the outstretched hem of a young girl's skirt. The stone columns are painted in alternating stripes of apricot and blue and the arches are enameled with intricate ceramic designs.

It is a charming tableau - and a far cry from Beit Farhi's condition when Roukbti bought it in 2004. (A successful Paris-based architect, Roukbti financed the purchase with the help of several partners.) Like so much of the largely evacuated Jewish quarter, the palace was a nesting place for squatters. More than a dozen families, mostly Palestinian refugees, were living in each of its many rooms and it took Roukbti six months to buy them out under Syrian law. The main reception hall, which the Farhis used as their personal synagogue, had been ransacked and burned by looters decades earlier. Even the fountain had been dug up and carried away. It took another six months to clear the debris and crumbled stone from years of neglect and plundering before the real work could begin. Whenever possible, Roukbti and Dijksma drew from indigenous sources to complete their work. The stones were quarried locally, though some of the marble was imported from Turkey and Italy. The pigmentation powder used in recreating Beit Farhi's iconic ochers and azures was obtained from nearby shops. They recruited dozens of young artisans to repair or recreate from scratch the elaborately carved wood ceilings, marble floors and delicate frescoes. "It was difficult to find them," says Roukbti, who has an artist's easy manner and a thick head of grizzled black hair. "And even then, I had to be on top of them all the time. But now they are highly skilled. This has been like a finishing school."

The work site has the quality and feel of an archaeological dig. The foundation of Beit Farhi begins with a layer of roughly hewn stones cut during the Aramaic period beneath far more precise masonry typical of Roman construction. The area was occupied by modest dwellings of black stone before the Farhis arrived in 1670 from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, where they lived for two centuries after King Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. "They came with money," says Roukbti. "And they came with powerful connections with Ottoman authorities."

It was the dawn of a powerful Syrian dynasty that lasted some 200 years. During Napoleon Bonaparte's advance on Palestine in 1799, Haim Farhi is credited by Jewish historians for having rallied the Jews of Acre in a successful resistance. An ambitious pasha had him killed in 1824, however, and a reprisal attack led by Raphael ended in failure with the loss of his brother, Solomon.

Despite Haim's death, the Farhis would enjoy unrivaled wealth and power over the next two decades with Raphael as treasurer and vizier to the sultanate. But his fortunes were undone in 1840 by the family's association with the suspected murder of a Franciscan monk. Several of Damascus' most prominent Jews were arrested in the matter, including a Farhi family member, and it took intercessions from high-ranking diplomats and officials - all the way up to Mohammed Ali, the rogue Ottoman ruler of Egypt and the Levant - to clear them of wrongdoing. The affair was a mortal disgrace for the Farhis, however, and they scattered themselves about the capitals of the world.

At the very least, Roukbti hopes the rebirth of Beit Farhi will redeem Syria's Jewish heritage - if not the Farhis themselves. Already, according to Cameo, two groups of Jews from abroad have visited the site and he is eager to host more. "This house has suffered so much," he says. "Its return is very important, not just for Syria's Jews but for all Syrians."

Egypt After Mubarak

The Nation 2009-04-27 Cairo is burning--in installments. It is a distinctively Egyptian joke, resonant as it is with politics, history and resignation. Last year, several of the city's landmark buildings burned under mysterious circumstances. In August, the top floor of the Parliament's Shura Council went up in flames as firemen, apparently short of adequate water supplies, looked on. A month later, the National Theatre was gutted. In November, thugs attacked the offices of the opposition El Ghad party with blowtorches while party members huddled inside and riot police stood by.

Cairo's immolation, the quip suggests, is a parody of the January 1952 blaze that consumed much of the city's commercial district and sparked a revolution. It is a tribute to the past and a morsel of wry humor from a people laid low by President Hosni Mubarak and his sclerotic, oppressive regime. As the country prepares for national elections in 2011, which Mubarak may or may not contest, the suspicious combustions have yet to kindle a popular uprising. But dissatisfaction with his rule and the prospect of a dynastic succession in a country that long ago overthrew a monarchy could make for a messy transfer of power in the Arab world's political epicenter.

The 80-year-old Mubarak has long depended on Egyptians' passivity--not to mention the implicit green light from Washington to persecute and incarcerate with impunity and the billions of dollars in annual subsidies guaranteed by the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But the former air force chief, who came to power after Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, is stretching the limits of his nation's good humor. His estrangement from the citizenry widened with his declaration of war on Hamas during Israel's winter assault on Gaza, and his circle of advisers, like a noose, has drawn tighter.

Mubarak has not announced if he intends to stand for another six-year term in elections scheduled for 2011. He may abdicate to an army general or the head of state security, or transfer power to his son, Gamal. One of the only public references Mubarak has made to the prospect of transition was in 2007, when he assured his former military colleagues that he would die in office.

Political observers are about evenly divided over whether a military man or Gamal will succeed Mubarak. Ibrahim Issa, the outspoken editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al Dustour, leans toward the brass. "There will be a struggle between the generals, the businessmen and the bureaucrats," he says. "The businessmen are hated, and the bureaucracy can't bear the idea of chaos, so the army will win. And why shouldn't they? They rule the country anyway."

Issa is a portly man with black horn-rimmed glasses, a droopy black moustache and kinetic eyebrows. His office walls are covered with life-size portraits of fellow revolutionaries Che Guevara and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and he is possessed of an authentically rapier Egyptian wit.

"Hosni Mubarak would never give up power," he told me. "He'll rule until he drops dead, and then Gamal Mubarak will be Egypt's Prince Charles." What about Washington? "The Americans bought Mubarak twenty-eight years ago because they believed he could maintain peace," said Issa. "But this was the tragedy of the Shah of Iran, when Washington supported him over Mossadegh. The Americans always trade despots for stability, and they get 'extremists' instead."

For Israel and the United States, that means the Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based global Islamist movement. Ikhwan in Arabic, it is by far the best organized and most popular political group in Egypt. Though banned by law--its members campaign and serve as independents--it controls the largest opposition bloc in Parliament. The Brotherhood poses the greatest potential threat to Mubarak's rule, yet it is also his guarantor of survival.

In 2005, in response to President George Bush's campaign for a democratic Middle East, Egyptians were allowed a shaft of political daylight when free elections were held. It was not secular parties that posted the biggest gains in the December polling but, rather, the Ikhwan, which won a quarter of the seats in Parliament. Its triumph was followed two months later by Hamas's election victory in Palestine. With that, Bush's romance with representative government in the Arab world ended.

Emboldened, Mubarak administered a pasting of the Ikhwan in fidelity with a tradition of anti-Brotherhood crackdowns that date back to the days of King Farouk. Since then, hundreds of Ikhwan members have been arrested and, it is widely presumed, tortured.

Mubarak cannot afford to neutralize the Ikhwan entirely, however. Islamism is the trump card he plays whenever foreigners call for a democratic Egypt and complain about the country's appalling human rights record. His message is clear: free and fair elections would install a fanatical Islamist government that would shred the country's peace treaty with Israel and, in league with Syria and Iran, open a third front against the Jewish state.

For Mubarak, Ikhwan-baiting is as lucrative as it is cynical. While dissident members have broken off to form radical cells--including Al Qaeda--there is no credible evidence linking the group to terrorist activity over the last half century. "I am convinced they are democratic and nonviolent, and I criticize those who have doubts," says Diaa Rashwan, a terrorist expert at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

In addition, estimates of the Ikhwan's electoral prospects have been revised downward since the 2005 ballot and the government's draconian response. (Ikhwan leaders didn't help themselves by issuing an edict last year that would restrict women and Christians from running for president.) Even the group's senior members say it would be self-destructive to mount a presidential bid in isolation of other parties should Mubarak ever loosen his monopoly on power.

"We want a coalition," says Abdel Monem Abou El-Fotouh, an Ikhwan leader and head of Egypt's medical union. "If there was a free and fair election, we might get 70 percent of the vote. But as democracy goes on and Egypt gets an independent judiciary, freedom of expression, freedom for women and so forth, that ratio would not be sustainable or desirable. In a free society, we need independent groups to become participants in power."

The US Congress is having none of this, of course. Last fall a prominent Egyptian dissident met with politicians and policy-makers in Washington and appealed to them to support a democratic Egypt. He spent a week in New York and Washington, and he was struck by the American obsession with, and ignorance of, the Ikhwan. "It was all they wanted to talk about," said the dissident, who asked that I not quote him. "Many of them were sure that this was a terrorist organization that would start a war with Israel were it not for Hosni Mubarak. They would not accept that the Ikhwan is a moderate organization and that we should work with them."

The man who would be pharaoh, 45-year-old Gamal Mubarak, has been at the vortex of Egyptian politics since 2002, when his father placed him at the head of the Policy Committee of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Over the next two years, Gamal refreshed a political establishment of hacks and hangers-on, with free-market enthusiasts lavishly praised by the World Bank. The Egyptian economy is one of the strongest performers among developing nations, yet the dividends have yet to reach the country's evaporating middle class. The gap between the top and bottom wage earners, meanwhile, has expanded ominously.

But Gamal Mubarak, who worked as an investment banker in London before returning to Cairo in 2000, is burdened not so much by high-level graft or income disparity--both drearily common in Egypt--as by a lack of depth. "He's lived all his life in the royal court and at the republican palace," says Osama Harb, a political commentator and former Gamal ally. "He has no meetings with working people, no sense of real life. Yet he believes he has a right to succeed his father."

In 2005, President Mubarak amended Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution to allow multiple candidates to vie for the presidency, a move that many analysts interpreted as a prelude to a bid by Gamal amid a field of strong contenders from the NDP-controlled People's Assembly. In this way, say critics, the Mubaraks could have their dynastic succession packaged as a democratic process.

Such a maneuver would still require sanction from the military, however. It is important to remember that in Egypt, perhaps more than anywhere else in the Arab world, politics is very much an ad hoc affair. In Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, new leaders are bred through the monarchy. In Syria, it's done through the Alawis. Egypt has no system for renewal; it has a host of competing constituencies (Arabs, Africans, Islamists, Copts, secularists, the lower coastal dwellers and the upper inlanders) but no institution to emulsify them. Gamal is a political orphan who lacks the influence and authenticity that could sustain a dynastic transfer of authority. So it will likely be the military, not Gamal Mubarak, that fills the void.

In 2007, with Gamal entrenched as the NDP's power center, the president felt obliged to sit down with army leaders and reassure them that he would remain in power indefinitely. For good measure, the meeting was reported in the state-owned Al Ahram newspaper. Without an understanding between President Mubarak and the military regarding the transition, analysts warn, Gamal could be dangerously exposed should his father die before naming a successor. Some suggest an interim junta might be formed. Or Gamal may become a titular prime minister with a military cabal calling the shots and Omar Suleiman, the head of state security, as chamberlain.

It is pleasant to believe the sheer weight of Egypt's cultural and political centrality will, like ballast in the hull of a ship, right the country through an uncertain transition. But Egyptians, a people of irrepressible good humor, are these days known for somber refrains.

"We need a genuine constitution," Harb, the political commentator, told me. "We need a multiparty political system, a free press, a free society. We need real NGOs that are not intimidated by the government, and we need to abolish the security state. Only then can Egypt be reborn." Otherwise, said Harb, "there will be general chaos. The army will be in the streets."

Alliance Creep

Al-Sijill
2009-04-09 19:27:19In spring 1999, during the war in Kosovo, I was dispatched to Brussels to cover the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombing of Serbian targets. For several weeks, I button-holed diplomats and military attaches in the corridors of NATO headquarters to learn about the latest twists and turns in the campaign. Would the sustained offensive force Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to end his attacks on Albanian separatists? If not, would NATO intervene with ground forces? I attended the daily briefings by then-NATO spokesman Jamie Shea and spent a day interviewing military officials at Mons, the Allied operations command center. It was a glamorous assignment. How often does one mix with charming internationalists in the heart of Europe? But looking back, what I remember most clearly was the sense of urgency about the place. Yes, there was the crisis in the Balkans to reckon with. But there was also the clear need among NATO officials to show they were somehow necessary eight years after the Cold War ended. Not only had NATO preserved itself intact following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it actually expanded. By combining alarmist cant - a unified Germany, we were told, might emerge as a "Fourth Reich" if not for a robust coalition to manage it - with the political muscle of US defense contractors, NATO fast-tracked the inclusion of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into its fold. American hegemony was extended to a then-prostrate Russia's very front door. Opposition to such an advance - a few Sovietologists and foreign policy "realists" warned it might one day needlessly provoke Moscow - was ignored. Still, the Kosovo War had revealed fault lines in NATO's ranks. The Americans were complaining that the Europeans had failed to invest adequately in their military capability, leaving it to the US to bear the brunt of the bombing. Diplomats told me, sotto voce, that the Kosovo campaign would be a wake-up call for the alliance. NATO, they told me, was on the brink of failing its first real test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this did not concentrate minds in the capitals of Europe, surely NATO would not survive. I dutifully took notes. It all sounded so dire. That was a decade ago. Last week, on the occasion of NATO's sixtieth anniversary, US president Barack Obama visited Strasbourg, France, to celebrate the staying power of a Cold War anachronism. A defense treaty ordained as a counterweight against a long-dead adversary has, thanks to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan, found new life. Empires rise and fall. Entire species come and go. Intrepid political-military types, it seems, are forever. NATO is now consumed by a different war, but the intramural tensions remain. In 1999, US officials were griping that the Europeans were backsliding under Washington's security umbrella to back-slide. They wanted the allies to invest in next-generation technology, including surveillance and cargo aircraft and command and control systems, which they wanted them to buy from US arms manufactures rather than develop them domestically. This was important, said the Americans, to ensure alliance "inter-operability." Needless to say, American defense contractors emphatically concurred. Nothing has changed. The new entrants into the alliance defied Washington by purchasing billions of dollars worth of non-US fighter jets. ("We're not just a market for US defense firms," the ambassador to Hungary's liaison office to NATO told me during the Kosovo campaign. "When NATO is disappointed, I care. I don't care if Lockheed Martin is disappointed.") In Afghanistan, units that make up the coalition's expeditionary force are effectively segregated from each other because their weaponry, from communications equipment to ordnance, operates on different standards and frequencies. President Obama's eloquent appeals notwithstanding, many European NATO members are losing interest in the Afghan war. The Strasbourg summit yielded little in the way of new transatlantic commitments to the eight-year-old conflict, to which Mr. Obama has pledged 21,000 US troops this year. The war in Afghanistan is becoming as Americanized as many experts say it is unwinnable. Afghanistan may not necessarily be the place empires go to die (the Mongols had a pretty good run there, from the 13th to the 15th centuries), but it may be enough to bury the Obama presidency. In retrospect, it is clear that the war on Milosevic was more about protecting NATO's rice bowl than it was about the strategic interests of its members. Perversely identifying the use of armed might as an end in itself, US Senator John McCain said at the time that any vital stake the US may have had in the Balkans was less important than a show of raw American might the moment Washington threatened to unleash it. "Credibility is a strategic asset of the highest order," said Mr. McCain, "and well worth fighting to maintain." Incredibly, despite the looming quagmire in Afghanistan, the disaster of Iraq, and Russia's short but brutish war with Georgia last year, Cold War fetishizers like Mr. McCain are still aching to pick a fight with Moscow by extending NATO membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. One hopes Mr. Obama's fulsome rhetoric about NATO's precious credibility belies a realist's cold, clear instincts. Rather than expand NATO, the US should slowly disengage from it. Washington should end plans to build its missile-defense system, which is hideously expensive, unproven, and needlessly provocative of Russia. Despite the likelihood of minor cuts in the Pentagon budget, the US still accounts for half the world's defense outlays. That fact, together with America's bankrupt economy, should compel the White House to redefine as a rational foreign policy one that balances commitments with resources.

Attack of the Primitives

Al-Sijill
2009-03-19 19:22:38Last month I phoned Chas W. Freeman, a friend of mine, and asked him if he would read a draft chapter from a book I am writing about how US foreign policy has became militarized since the end of World War II. He graciously agreed and we chatted for awhile about his recent visit to Wenzhou, a Chinese coastal city known for its industrial and entrepreneurial fecundity. A former diplomat in Asia and a fluent Mandarin speaker - he was Richard Nixon's translator during his historic visit to China in 1972 - Chas knows the country well and I was eager for his thoughts about my subject. The chapter focused on the plight of America's "China Hands" - the young diplomats who reported to the State Department about the conflict between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong's Communists. Chiang, they cabled Washington, was corrupt and unpopular. The US, they said, would do well to abandon him to his fate and engage Mao, who though a Marxist, enjoyed considerable good will among the people and was no Soviet stooge. It was sage advice; the Communists easily overran the Nationalists and by 1950, boycotted by the US government, allied with Moscow. For their prophesy, the China Hands - Mandarin-speakers all, men who knew China more intimately that most Chinese - were not only ignored, they were destroyed by a confederacy of politicians, media barons, and Christian groups that zealously supported Chiang as both a Christian and an anti-Communist. The China Lobby, as it was known, would control America's East Asian policy until Nixon, a charter member of the group, established diplomatic relations with Beijing. Had President Harry Truman resisted the lobby's pressure and established relations with Mao, many historians agree, the Cold War would have been much shorter and far less violent. It is unlikely, for example that the US would have intervened in Vietnam. A few days after our conversation, it was reported that Chas was slated to be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the inter-agency group that prepares evaluations for the president and other top-level officials. It was an inspired choice; in addition to his Asia credentials, Chas, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, also knows the Middle East inside and out. Chas is also known for his blunt appraisals and serrated wit. Unlike the timid rabbits that make up the Washington apparat, he has vocally criticized Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and the influence of Israel's own lobby on America's Middle East policy. To his credit, director of national intelligence Dennis Blair said he recruited Chas because of his willingness to stir up trouble, not despite of it. He praised Chas for his "inventive mind" and on-the-ground experience in two regions that will have enormous impact on global affairs well into the next generation. I myself was buoyed by Chas's appointment as a sign that the Obama administration was more interested in thoughtful analysis of the world as it is - particularly in the Middle East - rather than the addled concoction of it that prevails in the Beltway. I was aware Chas had made powerful enemies with this defense of Palestinian rights but I assumed he was safe, particularly as the position did not require a potentially explosive Senate confirmation that might damage the White House on other fronts. If the Likudnik drones in Congress made a fuss, all Obama had to do was ignore it. Like Blair, however, I was naïve. The knives quickly came out - among the foot soldiers. The big guns, namely the American-Israel Political Affairs Committee, publicly kept to the sidelines. A blogger named Steve Rosen was among the first to sound the tocsins, attributing to Chas strategically edited remarks that read like apologia for Beijing's 1989 massacre of student-demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. (Along with context, Rosen's onslaught was also absent of any reference to the fact that Israel, as one of China's most important sources of arms, is a guarantor of Beijing's autocracy.) Speaking of context, the fact that Rosen is an ex-AIPAC official indicted for passing US intelligence to Israel in violation of the Espionage Act is all one needs to know about how perverted US-Israeli affairs can be. Rendering credibility to a character like Rosen would be like giving a fair hearing to an alleged spy from the Arab-American Political Action Committee who charges Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, with conflicted loyalty because he reportedly has duel citizenship with Israel. And in fact, it was Emanuel who bore the brunt of Congressional outrage over Chas's appointment. Among other legislators, he was visited by a Democratic Representative named Steve Israel - as if this whole episode wasn't larded with enough irony - who told the Washington Post on March 10 that Blair's defense of Chas was "indefensible." So it's come to this. A career politician and Beltway habitué from New York's 2nd District is telling a former chief of the US Pacific Command, a man who led a carrier battle group in both the Atlantic and Pacific and who served on the National Security Council, what's best for American security. (The White House kept out of the affair; according to the Post, Blair was told he was on his own in this fight.) In 1950, journalist and China scholar Owen Lattimore responded to accusations by Senator Joe McCarthy that he was a high-level Communist spy: "I say to you gentlemen, that the sure way to destroy freedom of speech and the free expression of ideas and views is to attach to that freedom the penalty of abuse and vilification. If officials of our government cannot consult people of diverse views without exposing themselves to the kind of attack that Senator McCarthy has visited upon officers of the State Department, our government policy will necessarily be sterile. It is only from a diversity of views fully expressed and strongly advocated that sound policy is distilled. He who contributes to the destruction of this process is either a fool or an enemy of this country." Sadly, Lattimore's testimony resonates as strongly today as it did sixty years ago. Because of parochial politics, Americans have been deprived of a first-rate mind on issues vital to their security. Chas's lynching by functionaries with a pygmy-sized grasp of the Middle East and Asia proves that Washington has exchanged one totalitarian lobby for another. Full Article (in Arabic) (.pdf)

China, the Lifeline of America's Ailing Economy

The National
2009-03-10 19:42:58As if it were needed, Beijing served notice last week that despite the worldwide credit crunch, or perhaps because of it, China is still the most important economy on earth. No sooner did reports flicker across traders’ computer screens last Thursday about how China would soon unveil a new stimulus package than global stock and commodities markets sprang to life. The rebound was led by mining and resource companies such as Australia’s Rio Tinto, which happens to be on the receiving end of a US$19.5 billion (Dh71.62bn) equity investment from China’s largest aluminium producer. As it turned out, the official at the centre of those reports, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, insisted he was misquoted and share prices resumed their grim slide the next day. But the point was lost on no one: the world may catch a cold when the US sneezes, but the potion for recovery is in Beijing, not Washington. Given the rate at which Barack Obama, the US president, is cutting promissory notes to global investors – which many economists agree is the only way out of the hole dug for him by his predecessor – the US is on its way to becoming one of the world’s most indebted economies as well as its largest. As America’s primary lender with more than $2 trillion in foreign reserves, China is doing more to keep the US economy alive than any other creditor nation. And its government is taking heat for it. The backdrop to Beijing’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress (NPC), which started its annual meeting last week and concludes this Friday, is the growing demand among many Chinese – from industrialists to bankers to jobless migrant workers – that financial Mandarins such as Mr Wen transfer some of the country’s foreign exchange riches out of low-yielding dollar-denominated accounts and convert them into local currency so they can be invested at home. This is unlikely to happen any time soon. True, economic planners around the world are hoping China will double up on the 4 trillion yuan (Dh2.14tn) stimulus package it announced in November, just as Standard Chartered Bank suggested it might do in a report issued last week. But they’d prefer it be financed from Beijing’s national account and not from its war chest of foreign reserves. The moment word leaks out that China is dumping $1tn in greenbacks for yuan or perhaps another currency that offers better returns, the stimulus bill Mr Obama laboured so mightily last month to push through Congress won’t be worth yesterday’s dim sum. Nor is the Chinese government eager to do anything that would sharply depreciate the value of their hard-won hard currency. Fortunately, China has room to manoeuvre. Retail sales are high and lending is on the rise. At the NPC, Mr Wen and other senior officials have been projecting confidence that China would manage growth of more than 8 per cent amid signs that the economy is responding to the spending package despite plummeting export sales. (Some economists fear, however, that Beijing is trying to deflect the growing chorus of criticism with happy talk while providing few details about how funds from the stimulus package are to be spent.) That said, the global economic crisis is taking a huge toll on China’s export-led economy. An estimated 20 million to 40 million migrant labourers, part of an army of workers who over the last generation has flocked to the country’s urban areas in search of jobs, are now unemployed and heading home. Even worse, some 1.6 million college graduates are spilling into a stagnant job market. The worst fear of all Chinese leaders – thousands of people on a train heading for nowhere – is perilously close to being realised. Add to that the kind of disgruntled students who formed the core of the pro-democracy movement that led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and you have the trace elements for conflagration. “There is fuel there,” said Charles Freeman, a China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Traditionally, the biggest source of concern for the leadership is a group of students that is politically dissatisfied, particularly if they ally with migrants.” Last week, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank and one of the smartest people in Washington, referred to the US and Chinese economies as “the G-2”. Without healthy US-China commercial ties, he argued in a column he co-wrote for The Washington Post with Justin Yifu Lin, the bank’s chief economist, “the Group of 20 will disappoint”. Mr Zoellick is right. Given America’s critical dependence on Beijing as the very lifeline of its economy, it is also fair to say that within this exclusive group, China is first among equals.

Finding the Reset Button at the State Department

Al-Sijill
2009-03-12 15:02:59Set aside for a moment Hillary Clinton's mealy-mouthed assertion last week that expanding West Bank settlements is "unhelpful" to the goal of Middle East peace. After all, no one expected her to express anything more than wan protest at the colonizing of Palestinian land on her first Middle East visit as Secretary of State. Instead, let's focus on Mrs. Clinton's offering to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov during their meeting in Geneva: a "reset" button to illustrate President Barack Obama's desire to repair Washington's Bush-battered relations with Moscow. When Lavrov good naturedly pointed out that the inscription on the button was mistranslated - it came out as "overcharge" rather than "reset" - Clinton laughed off the episode and moved on. Fair enough. But there was something revealing about the oversight. Think about it: the world's most powerful country, which maintains fortress-like missions staffed by thousands of people around the world, apparently can't come up with a Russian-speaker on the fly. Couldn't the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Gag Gifts and Witty Rejoinders put in a call to the US embassy in Moscow for a proper translation? Had I known, I could have phoned Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State and Russophile who hangs out at the same guitar shop I do, and appealed to him for help. Trivial as it seems, the botched-button incident is symptomatic of a deeper malaise that afflicts America's diplomatic corps, one Clinton herself has vowed to remedy. It may not seem like it, given the enormous US embassy in Abdoun (assuming it hasn't gone into foreclosure), but America's diplomatic resources are stretched reed thin. In June 2008, according to F. Anthony Holmes of the Council on Foreign Relations, there were only 6,636 Foreign Service Officers in the State Department, just ten percent more than 25 years ago, when there were 24 fewer countries in the world. The gap between human resources and workload is so wide that FSOs receive little training because there is no one to cover for them in their absence. America's diplomatic missions suffer from a vacancy rate of 30 percent in Africa and 21 percent overall. Vital work is being neglected, particularly in post-conflict areas; the number of FSOs seconded to the United States Agency for International Development has declined by 75 percent since the 1970s. True, President Barack Obama's fiscal 2010 budget calls for a multi-year effort to significantly increase the size of the Foreign Service at both the Department of State and USAID. Not only does the foreign service welcome such a reprieve, so do senior military officers. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has lamented what he calls the "militarization" of US foreign policy and has called for a strengthening of America's diplomatic muscle. Late last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for a greater emphasis of "non-military instruments of international influence...and capabilities for American diplomacy." How did the US Department of State, once the fountainhead of US foreign policy and the face of America overseas, become so diminished? It has been a long recessional, to quote Rudyard Kipling, one that intensified under Mrs. Clinton's predecessor, Condoleezza Rice. Having declared herself in a January 2006 speech for "bold diplomacy...that seeks to change the world," Ms. Rice failed to lobby for additional funding to underwrite her sweeping vision. As Mr. Holmes, a former ambassador to Burkina Faso, writes in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, "diplomats need well-funded programs in order to have more than a symbolic impact. These programs do no exist. They were never requested, and the 300 people reassigned to strategically important developing countries over the past three years have had virtually no new resources to work with." Just as damaging to US diplomacy, according to Mr. Holmes, was a culture of fear that discouraged dissent. "Officers who dared to give unvarnished analysis of policy options," he writes, "have been ignored, penalized, or banished. In some bureaus, the number of politically appointed ‘special advisers' - who in effect function as political commissars by enforcing policy discipline regardless of events on the ground - has increased dramatically." This became clear in the Bush administration's first term, particularly as it related to the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, its preserve of Arab experts. Officers like Ron Schlicher, for example, a veteran FSO and fluent Arabic speaker with experience in places like Cairo and Jerusalem, were the kind of diplomats who in another era would have been fast-tracked for senior posts in the Middle East. In 2004, Schlicher was awarded the American Foreign Service Association's annual prize for producing the Department's best "dissent" cables, part of a tradition of robust internal debate. But Schlicher was careful not to boast about his prize lest he provoke a backlash from the very White House whose policies he challenged in the State Department's once-proud Open Forum system. Today, writes Mr. Holmes, "it has become increasingly difficult for the American Foreign Service Association, the exclusive representative of the entire Foreign Service, to elicit nominations for its annual Constructive Dissent awards, because voicing criticism of US policy is now so rare." A shortage of personnel and a climate of fear is a weak platform for assertive, confident diplomacy. If Mrs. Clinton is serious about reviving America's civilian representation abroad, she'll need more money than Congress is willing to allocate and stronger leadership than her predecessor was capable of delivering. If anything, it's the Department of State that needs to be reset. Full Article (in Arabic) (.pdf)

Opportunity Lost, Part I: A Plan for a Key Gaza Crossing Was Foiled by Israel after Hamas' Election Victory

Al-Sijill 2009-02-05 19:00:47The Karni crossing is Gaza’s main artery for trade, with the capacity to process more than a thousand truck crossings a day. Following the outbreak of the second Intifada, however, Israel imposed a tight inspection regime on its side of the Karni terminal that reduced throughput to a trickle. As part of a 2005 US-brokered initiative to improve economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel agreed to ease its control over Palestinian roads and border crossings in exchange for American-funded improvements of Palestinian inspection systems and security forces. Between the signing of the accord and Hamas’ seizure of Gaza in November 2007, hard-liners in Israel and their allies in Washington managed to thwart the deal. How they did it, to be recounted here in a two-part series, offers a glimpse of the obstacles President Barack Obama might face should he seriously negotiate on behalf of a Palestinian state with a viable economy as its foundation. Ephraim Sneh, a leader of Israel’s pro-peace movement and a former aid to Yitzhak Rabin, is used to the political wilderness. Not long after Rabin’s killing in 1996, he pushed Israel and the US government to buttress the Oslo process by investing in the Palestinian economy. He presented then-US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and other senior US policymakers with a list of seven projects that would give ordinary Palestinians a stake in a peaceful future. They included a new airport at the Kallandia refugee camp, sea ports at Gaza, desalination plans – and a modern cargo terminal at Karni. “If you change the economic reality you can change the political reality,” Sneh told the Americans. “By improving the Palestinian economy, you can fight terrorism.” No one listened to him. Nearly a decade later, with Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank and the incarceration of Gaza bleeding the Palestinian economy white, Sneh was vindicated. The former commando and brigadier general was given responsibility for Israel’s commitments under the Access and Mobility Agreement, which was signed in November 2005 in response to heavy pressure from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At the heart of the agreement was a vision Sneh, a fluent Arabic speaker and a former occupation governor of the West Bank, had nurtured for many years: the development of Karni and other Palestinian border crossings into efficient and secure entrepôts for trade. The agreement set ambitious goals for itself, particularly as it related to Karni. The Palestinians on their side would be given tens of millions of dollars to train border guards, build new roads, and install security and payroll systems, while the Israelis would be provided with $12 million worth of state-of-the-art scanning and surveillance equipment. By late January 2006, according to the agreement, truck crossings would reach 1,200 a day, a third of which would be carrying goods made by Palestinians for sale abroad, a crucial source of foreign exchange for the impoverished Gaza strip. The project was quickly snagged, however, on a dispute between Israel and the US Agency for International Development over the scanning equipment. Due to the tight deadlines imposed by the agreement – the scanners needed to be in place by December 31, 2005 – it was decided USAID would first lease the surveillance systems and purchase new ones later on. The leases were signed on December 8 and a few weeks later the scanners were flown from Europe to Tel Aviv on a Russian Antonov 225, the world’s largest cargo jet, at a cost of $500,000. Such an elaborate charter was necessary, according to a December 2006 USAID report, given the size of the equipment and the urgency of the situation. Once the scanners were delivered, a herd of Israeli bureaucracies – from the Ministry of Defense to the Israeli Airport Authority – submitted to USAID a list of demands for adjustments and alterations that would cost the US government an estimated $6 million to address. The list, according to an official with Chemonics, USAID’s contracting agent on the project, ranged from the substantive – for example, Israel wanted the capacity to scan three trucks at once, which required extensive retrofits and new software – to the trivial, such as a request that the nickel doorknobs in the scanners’ control rooms be replaced with brass ones. It took six months to address Israel’s conditions even after they had been narrowed down by USAID. A careful reading of the USAID report suggests Israel was trying to sabotage the mobility agreement by delaying integration of the scanners. “The majority of retrofitting tasks required extensive technical modification and in several instances, delayed or interrupted equipment deployment and operations at several sites,” the report states. “These initiatives, while justifiable in the context of [the defense ministry’s] concerns, have been perceived by the suppliers as excessive and redundant for leased equipment.” In January 2006, USAID began negotiating for the purchase of the replacement scanners. Five companies expressed an interest in the project, but nearly all of them complained of a battery of new restrictions imposed by Israel. The Israeli side, they said, was demanding technology that would have to be developed from scratch even as it desired a system already in production and with a performance record of two years. It also insisted on having a majority of seats on a committee to evaluate the scanners as opposed to the customary single-seat, third-party representation, and it wanted the evaluation process to take 90 days instead of the usual three weeks. These and other conditions would have delayed deployment of the new scanners by at least two months, according to USAID. When the frustrated bidding companies threatened to walk out of the negotiations, USAID unilaterally signed a contract with AS&E, a US-Chinese joint venture. Outraged, a senior Israeli defense official filed a formal protest to the US embassy complaining that USAID’s pre-emptive action jeopardized Israeli security. USAID was then instructed to write a letter to the defense ministry reaffirming the centrality of its security concerns, but the contract was honored. The dispute over the scanners had been resolved, though Israel’s demands for retrofits would delay their full deployment for several months. As a result, cargo traffic at Karni would be kept to a paltry few hundred truck crossings a day. But after Hamas’ victory in parliamentary elections in January 2006, it no longer mattered. Well before the first vote was cast, Israel’s allies in Washington were mobilizing for the internment of Palestine.

To a Bailout Economy: Defense Contractors Fight Budget Cuts With Jobs Promises

US News & World Report
2009-02-27 14:41:22Leave it to the merchants of war to mount a nimble rearguard action. America's defense contractors, who never shied from exploiting the Iraq war for commercial gain, are now marketing themselves as a critical source of employment amid murmurs of the most significant cuts in defense spending in a generation. Production of components for missile defense systems sustains 1,936 jobs and generates $192 million annually for the economy of the state of Arizona, Boeing points out in a recent press release. The F-22 Raptor has created 44,000 jobs nationwide, says Lockheed Martin, the company that builds the state-of-the-art fighter jet. The U.S. auto industry may be on life support, but the Army's Future Combat Systems program is keeping 1,678 people employed, declares the U.S. Army. Well-to borrow that underappreciated phrase from Marilyn Rice-Davies-they would, wouldn't they? The Pentagon, after all, is no more willing to see the dispatching of its budget ox than any other government agency. The Office of Management and Budget announced last week that the Obama administration is setting the Pentagon's 2010 budget at $524 billion, about $60 billion below its draft spending plan. Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has warned the Pentagon that its wish list for costly, high-tech weaponry may be pared back at a time when two simultaneous wars have depleted the military of more basic warfighting wares. Arms makers are not the only one who have cause for concern. In case you haven't noticed it, the War on Terror is over. Reporters in Washington have recently noted how President Barack Obama has all but jettisoned the term, which had no redeeming value except as a device to scare voters, cow lawmakers-and sustain a national security budget that made Washington the epicenter of Terror Inc. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress allocated billions of dollars for states to shore up their defenses against a future assault. (In a cautionary tale for those following the negotiations over Mr. Obama's economic stimulus plan, much of those funds ended up paying for pork-barrel projects that had nothing to do with national defense.) To ensure a larger slice of the counter-terrorism pie, governors hired armies of Washington lobbyists to plead their case to Congress. To win their share of related business, security companies hired consulting agencies to polish their bids and presentations. The consulting agencies, in turn, hired more staff and rented larger, more elegant office space. That increased the demand for office buildings, which created the need for builders, which meant more building tools and materials. Within months, Terror Inc. had spawned the Terror Economy, a vortex of new weapons and warriors, Jersey barriers, commercial property agents, PowerPoint presenters, uniform designers, arms-show caterers, systems integrators, and software creators. Well before mid-2007, when America's bubble economy finally burst, Washington, D.C., had become a Jerusalem of terror where thousands of security specialists, contractors, consultants, and pundits would gather to peddle their orthodoxy and replenish their address books. Their mass exodus to Washington fueled a construction boom so extensive that entire city blocks were cordoned off for months. The economic output that was lost to traffic snarls and other burdens on the city's blighted infrastructure was more than compensated for by the demand for hotel conference rooms, embassy security, and duck tape. Now that the War on Terror is over, what will sustain Washington as the New Acropolis? Why, the Bailout Economy, of course. Mr. Obama's massive stimulus package will make the states more dependent on Washington than ever. Conveniently, the people who will dominate the Bailout Economy are already in place. The same lobbyists who worked Congress for antiterrorist funding will cajole lawmakers for money for new roads and airports. The same companies that bagged the big deals of the Terror Economy-the highly diversified Lockheed Martins, Raytheons, and Boeings-will build the Bailout Economy's energy grids, rail links, and computer networks. That, after all, is how Washington works. Not for nothing has the city been likened to a giant rotisserie of the same warmed-over faces and corporate logos. Consider Mr. Obama's cabinet of Clinton-era retreads. The same people who helped do in the Real Economy with an overdose of financial deregulation-Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, for example, or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner-are now back in charge. No matter. The Terror Economy is dead. Long live the Bailout Economy. Pity the taxpayer.

Sowing Dragon's Teeth

Al-Sijill
2009-02-26 22:53:02At least one enterprise is recession-proof: selling arms to Arabs. This week's International Defense Exhibition & Conference, the Middle East's top arms show, was the largest one ever held. Thousands of arms producers and buyers made the pilgrimage to host-city Abu Dhabi to marvel at the "defense solutions" - euphemism is an arms industry art - on display. IDEX is the Jerusalem of arms sales these days; Arab government's appetite for new weaponry is undiminished despite the global recession and falling oil prices, and Iraq - war-torn, fragile Iraq - has become a growth market in the bazaar. Baghdad will soon take delivery of a package of $11 billion worth of new weapons, including C130 transport aircraft and assault helicopters armed with Hellfire anti-tank guided missiles. The cornerstone of the deal, however, is the M1 main battle tank. Iraq will buy 140 of them, variants of which are already deployed in far greater numbers by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Even a relatively small complement of M1s is enough to give pause to Iraq's neighbor and ancient rival, however. Iranians remembers well the terrors of their war with Saddam Hussein's armies, which lasted nearly the whole of the 1980s and claimed a half-million lives, many of them civilian. Tehran has little to worry about, at least for now. A hundred or so M1s are hardly a threat to massive, mountainous Iran. (Besides, the explosive devices Iran has fashioned for Iraqi insurgents have managed to penetrate the M1's armor.) Truth be told, the arsenal Iraq is procuring from the US is more likely to be deployed against domestic challenges to Baghdad's authority - a Kurdish grab of disputed Kirkuk, for example - than against any threats from abroad. Still, motorized armor and air transport gives Baghdad the ability to project force well beyond the 200 kilometer radius the Pentagon had early prescribed for Iraq's military. Plus, Baghdad's purchase of the M1 and other American-made weapons will create an enduringly umbilical link between the two countries long after the bulk of US troops are withdrawn from the country. Ahead of a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Iraq's defense minister told reporters that the US-South Korea military relationship could be a model for Iraq-US ties. (Note to Iraqis: American forces arrived on the Korean peninsula in 1951 and show no sign of leaving anytime soon.) "With all this hardware comes the need for US maintenance and spare parts," says Nathan Hughes, an analyst at Stratfor, the global intelligence company. "It builds the foundation for cooperation, for training, upgrades, and also doctrinal links. This gives the US a foothold in Iraq." The US is not alone. France, for example, which along with the Russians was a major supplier to Saddam Hussein, has signaled its willingness to help Baghdad rearm itself. And it's not as if there isn't plenty of business to go around the region. In 2007, the Bush administration and other governments made available to the Gulf states state-of-the-art weaponry at discounted prices as a counterweight to the looming threat from Iran. Arab governments responded with alacrity, racking up some $20 billion in orders "out of fear," according to the Washington Post, "that US military installations on their territory would make them targets in an American war with Iran." What could be more Orwellian than that? Buying weapons to protect yourself from the threat posed by the presence of other weapons. Every country has a responsibility to protect itself, particularly in a neighborhood as dangerous as the Middle East. Yet for all the hand-wringing over Tehran as a "regional power" and the addled musings of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, it's worth noting that Iran is one of the most screwed-up countries on Earth. Its economy is Balkanized by the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard that has developed its own commercial empire, and the Bonyads, the charitable groups run by ex-ministers that are engorging themselves on the country's hugely corrupt privatization program. Its youth suffers from an AIDS epidemic, rising drug-addiction rates, and a jobless level of about 20 percent. The number of working-age adults entering the economy is growing at about 4 percent a year, among the highest such rates in the world. Inflation is in double digits, the consequence of entrenched subsidies funded by oil revenue. And in fact, Iran cannot even take its petroleum riches for granted, however. Because of chronic underinvestment in the country's energy fields, Tehran is expected to be a net oil importer by 2020. Far from being a cohesive autocracy and geopolitical giant, Iran is so fractured economically it is practically ungovernable. All of which is cold comfort for Israel and the Arab world's ruling establishment, sitting as they are in the cross-hairs of Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. But those are asymmetrical threats against which battle tanks and attack helicopters are of dubious value, as demonstrated by Israel's inconclusive war on Gaza and its failed 2006 conflict in southern Lebanon. Ditto Iran's nuclear ambitions, a product of Persian ego and insecurity that is unlikely to be disposed of absent the declaration of the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone, which is about as likely as an Israeli pavilion at this week's IDEX. With cuts slated for the Pentagon's $100 billion arms procurement budget, the Middle East remains a lucrative trough for US defense contractors. Thankfully for them, they have an able pitch man in Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad. The "post-9/11 arms spigot" as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates called it, may indeed be closing, but there's still a torrent of deals to be cut in the Arab world. Of course, given the region's instability, it is entirely possible that the weapons sold to one regime today could end up in the hands of a very different one some years down the road. The Chinese call this "sowing dragon's teeth."

China Moves On While the US Bickers

The National 2009-02-17 21:44:56There is more than one way to jump-start an economy. The American way – the sausage-factory way – entered a new phase last week with the passage of a US$787 billion (Dh2.89 trillion) stimulus package by a bitterly divided Congress. Having begun with a White House pledge of bipartisanship two weeks ago, the debate over the stimulus package proposed by the US President, Barack Obama, descended into reciprocal charges of bad faith and impugned motives. Republicans demanded aggressive tax cuts and recoiled at the bill’s spending programmes, which they said represented a huge burden for an unborn generation of taxpayers. Democrats pointed out that Republicans had just taken a drubbing in national elections in response to an economic implosion that happened on their watch. Republicans threatened to derail the bill with a filibuster, or deliberate delaying tactic. Democrats countered by accusing the Republicans of holding a fragile economy hostage to the kind of supply-side economic orthodoxy that led to the recession in the first place. In the end, the 1,100-page bill was passed by the Senate after three moderate Republicans defected to Mr Obama’s side. The package includes $212bn in tax relief, while the balance will be spent on everything from new housing and transport projects to energy and water systems. Much of those outlays will be channelled through state governments, which have the authority to spend the money pretty much however they see fit, including debt reduction, which will do little to generate new jobs. Nor is the bill structured for a quick-fix; its spending mechanisms won’t kick in fully until 2010 or even 2011, while adding more debt – about $1tn including interest rate payments – than the combined value of the first three years of budget shortfalls under the former president, George W Bush. And this is just one component to Mr Obama’s recovery plan. Last week, the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner – having just survived a minor scandal involving some $34,000 in back taxes – announced the details of his financial sector rescue plan, which is at least as important for recovery as the stimulus package. Neither Mr Geithner nor his plan, which could cost as much as $1tn to implement, inspired much confidence. Stock investors panned Mr Geithner’s less than charismatic delivery and a lack of details about the plan itself, in particular an ambitious public-private partnership to buy bad assets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 4.6 per cent of its value for the day, and was left wallowing at its lowest level since Mr Obama’s inauguration. Then there is the Chinese way. In November, Beijing announced its own stimulus package which, at 4tn yuan (Dh2.1tn), is far larger as a percentage of its economy than is Washington’s version. Needless to say, China’s political leaders are unburdened with such trifles as legislative procedure. When they looked in their rear-view mirrors last autumn and saw the global recession coming after them, they simply huddled with their finance mandarins and authorised a transfer from their $1.95tn in foreign exchange reserves to the financial system. Chinese banks, unlike their bad-debt-plagued US counterparts, are reviving the economy by writing loans. The value of new borrowing last month, at $237bn, was more than double the record set a year earlier, according to Beijing’s central bank, and construction of new public works, housing developments and railway lines is well under way. The price of steel has soared and the decline in industrial output has been arrested. Despite a decline in exports – China’s lifeblood – a survey of 14 economists posted last week by Bloomberg News suggested China could be the first economy to recover from the global slowdown thanks to increased consumption and investment. They anticipate annualised growth of between 6 per cent and 8 per cent, which China needs to regenerate the tens of millions of jobs that have been lost in the past few months. Has China, the world’s third-largest economy, already turned the corner? Could this be the beginning of the great “rebalancing” of global trade flows as Chinese consumers learn to spend and Americans learn to save? It will take six months to say for sure. If anything, the unseemly haggling in Washington and the legislative and political battles to come underline just how deep is America’s economic hole relative to China’s. While toxic debt did much to trigger the US recession, the amount of debt overall – an estimated several trillion dollars over the life of Mr Obama’s first term – will make a US recovery that much more difficult. Whether they like it or not, Americans will have to re-evaluate the fundamentals of their free-market economy, from the virtue of home ownership to the viability of suburban living. China, on the other hand, has only to keep doing what it has been doing.